


The Apple of Your Eye

by Omano



Series: Never Apart [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angelic Grace, Angels have serious issues, Angry Kissing, Angst, Angst and Feels, Blood Kink, Bonding, Caring, Codependency, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Forgiveness, Grace Kink, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Lucifer's Cage, M/M, Obsessive Behavior, Possessive Behavior, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Fall episodes, Pre-fall fluff, Sacrifice, Self Confidence Issues, Sword of Michael, There are some happy moments too I swear!, Violence, Wing Kink, angry sad sex, gentle wall sex, slight dementia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2015-03-26
Packaged: 2018-03-19 18:08:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 21
Words: 52,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3619341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omano/pseuds/Omano
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With the angels falling, Michael and Lucifer are out of their prison as well. But as it soon turns out living together suffering from aftershocks of their abrupt get-out isn't a piece of cake what with Lucifer's thirst for revenge and Michael's grace burning out through the crack that still somehow connects him to their time in the Cage. Michael is turning human; and Lucifer just won't let this happen -- for the sake of his own sanity or the sake of the world not slipping into what we know as The End.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. God is gonna cut you down

**Author's Note:**

> My entry for the [Angelcest BigBang](http://angel-bigbang.livejournal.com/) event. 
> 
> I think before everything it's time for special thanks to the amazing people around me!
> 
> First of all a  _huge_ thanks to my amazing artist, [Tarte](http://tartedelart.tumblr.com/) whose awesomeness just cannot be described as words don't do it any justice. Seriously, you'll cry how beautiful her arts are!
> 
> Now there is also a [fanmix ](http://8tracks.com/espressoinfinite-918/never-look-away) for this fic! Go and check it out, it's amazing!!! <3 Made by [fluffygodsquad](http://fluffygodsquad.tumblr.com/)Q^Q  
> And while we're talking music I think it's high time for me to proclaim that this work was inspired by Breaking Benjamin's Had Enough.
> 
> Also big hug and THANKS to the goddess of patience and support, [D'sha](http://dsha2127.tumblr.com/), who heroically listened to me whining for more than half a year about this project (I'm not kidding), and singelhandedly solved all my plot-hole and ending problems. You'll be entitled to curse both me and her for the ending of this fic. She also took on the awful task of beta'ing my story, pointing out my mistakes and giving insight and ideas. Really dear, without you I wouldn't have gotten this done! <3
> 
> Thank you to everyone who patted me on the back and just listened to me cry and whine how I hate this project. You are all awesome, and I hope  can give you back something. 
> 
> To all the amazing Michifer-people who accepted me and don't fail to support my projects.
> 
> Please, enjoy!
> 
> And here is the [ART LINK](http://tartedelart.tumblr.com/post/114675742149/the-apple-of-your-eye-masterpost-link-to-the-fic)! Go and give some love and expression of your awe to Tarte! You know, you want to. Check it out, before you start reading, or meanwhile, just don't forget to praise her for her amazing job!

                                                             

#  The Apple of Your Eye

 

                                                                       

 

There are things Lucifer doesn’t want to remember. And then there are things he doesn’t remember.  For once Fate is kind to him. He is fine as far as the scale stays like this.

 

He honestly expected more fighting. Active, world-destructive fighting, one that might not start another round of Apocalypse, because both Michael and he are a bit short of true vessels at the moment, but at least a duel that would blow up Detroit.

Just to contradict his expectations the house is dark and eerily silent. Except for a constant buzzing chaotic presence at the back of his mind that he came to identify as Michael.

Somehow in the Cage they reconnected and Lucifer is back on the Angel-network. If he were to be bothered enough or just bored out of his mind (which would take much more now that he has things to look at and not just the impassionate flow and ebb of _nothing_ in his cell) he could hear everything the other archangel is exposed to.

They were lifted from Hell four days back. No explanations, no new orders. Lucifer cussed at the sky, a jarring scream at the myriad of stars swimming in the blood of sunset, then shoved his hands into the pockets of his still miraculously functioning vessel’s rough jeans and left Maryland. He was done.

Michael tagged along. But he was hardly more than a silent shadow, dark and looming at the periphery of Lucifer’s conscience.

Lucifer didn’t question his presence. It seemed logical that after all the centuries they were locked up they would stay together on this human plane as well.

If it were up to Michael though, they could live in different corners of the universe when the eldest only holed himself up in the far north room upstairs. Door securely closed, and if Lucifer had to take a guess Michael hasn’t been out ever since he moved in.

The distance the unbreakable door provides between them doesn’t deter him the slightest from torturing Michael. Because Lucifer hasn’t forgiven. He never will. He doesn’t need physical contact to break and smash and claw inside his brother’s grace, ripping it apart until he hears the collapse of the crystal castle through the link they share. He is persistent and consistent. Two to three hours a day Lucifer spends rattling on the door, testing its defences before he starts to talk, twisting and weaving his words into a fine, silver net that is crueller than any possible lie.

He blames Michael for the aborted Apocalypse. If he had managed to take his true vessel, if he could get just one job done right they wouldn’t be here. He failed his orders. Lucifer calls Michael a coward. He remembers that nothing riled up the Prince of the Heavenly Host more than being called a poltroon, meek and suggestible. Wherein he was (and most probably still is) just that: easy to order about if one managed to worm their way under his skin.

Next day he changes the song. He asks Michael to come out, so that they could live their second chance. When he doesn’t hear anything from the impossible depth of the room he returns to blaming. If Michael doesn’t want to rebuild the bridges with a _monster_ then why does he stay huddled up in his cave? The Slayer of the Adversary hiding away because he is weak!

Lucifer is very resourceful with his words.

When he grows bored, he returns to his garden watching his roses as they bloom uncaring of the weather. Lucifer enjoys running his finger delicately along the frosty edges of the blood-coloured petals with the sound of the distant soft roar of a star burning up, sizzling darkly.


	2. Carved from Marble

 

A week into their freedom Lucifer leans over the stove with a neutrally bemused expression waiting for it to heat.  He holds a hand over the hot stream of wavering air, wriggling his fingers experimentally before pressing his palm down.

Near immediately his vessel tries to jerk away, working on some stupid human instinct he believed he had weeded out but it seems he has to start the process over. He relents and only flinches a bit at the pain as the skin on his hand burns. The stench of scorched meat is heavy in the kitchen.

There is a jolt on the other end of the line that connects him back to his brother. 

Lucifer had learnt that Michael feels it when he is hurt. If he had to take a guess, he would say Michael hisses more at the sting of a thorn under his vessel’s nail, grunts at a cut on the finger or screams with agony when Lucifer is about to roast his own hand.

Pain travels on their linkage like voice on water, and for someone who has never really taken a vessel before, not to mention hasn’t experienced it dissolving around him, it must be a striking sensation.

Lucifer just pulled back his hand – the skin that managed to cling to his palm is nothing but a mass of disgusting blisters, and on the surface of the stove the rest is burning black – and is measuring if he should try it with the other as well when Michael arrives on silent feet into the twilit room.

Michael’s vessel is in horrible shape. His hair is mussed unruly dark chaos, skin pale and greyish even despite the glow of his grace beneath, as though even the archangel’s essence was sick with what Lucifer has put him through. The eyes levelling Lucifer with something even he cannot read are haunted and burning wild.

_This whole wicked humankind would perish in that beautiful firestorm if it only had the chance to break free from the iron leash of obedience._

Such wandering thought is enough for Michael to reach Lucifer. With strong fingers he snatches his hand and presses the burnt palm to the side of his face.

Lucifer's skin is sizzling against the hard line of his cheekbone – the contact hurts, as Michael is burning feverish. Even through the destroyed nerves he can feel it on the raw patch that thinned to allow his grace to surge towards the surface and _feel_ – but soon the shrunken burnt texture is no longer on his palm but on Michael. Lucifer wants to jerk his hand away, his own eyes crackling with lightning but Michael keeps his firm hold, dropped on his knees in front of his brother, eyes bearing into his very core.

"What else do you want from me?" Michael asks soft but firm, like the first rumble of the earth before the volcano erupts. "Haven't you tortured me enough?"

_No!_ Lucifer wants to cry, but his lips only curl into a sharp smile, because it is not his style.  But there will never be enough torture he is sure; no matter how cruel this world was created to be.

However, before Lucifer could share the harsh truth with Michael, mocking gently his weakness and how easily he broke Michael moves fluid and with his usual purposeful grace. The next moment it's the cold hilt of a sword that his fingers are wrapped around with Michael's warm hand around his. He places the tip of the silver sword a little left to the centre of his own chest.

"What else could you want from me?" Michael asks again.

Michael’s gaze is hard like seething steel freshly drowned in water.

There is something beyond broken, something beyond the thick curtain of blue fire edged with golden rust, something so hot it is freezing and so terrifyingly deep Lucifer does not dare to dwell in it and quickly erupts in his own blizzard to crush that strip of light.

Michael has always been the one to burst with anger when it came to it. Lucifer collected the cold chunks of hatred and bitterness until they built and he had a detailed plan to make the whole universe suffer for the smallest wrong that had been done to him, but now he cannot still his hand.

He tears it away from the elder’s grip and, uncaring if it’s the blade or the hilt of the sword, he slaps Michael across the face. The other angel stumbles back and slips across the room until his head collides with the opposite wall. Lucifer is quick to straddle his chest and wrap his free hand around the marble-like clear line of Michael's throat squeezing. He relishes in the sight as Michael gasps for air. His eyes flutter, and he struggles, tries in vain so that his chest could expand for some precious air but Lucifer is an immovable presence over him. 

There is a long bleeding wound on the side of Michael's hard, blister covered face. 

"How deep could you sink, Michael?" Lucifer spits, malicious and cold, but he leans close until he can feel the desperate shallow puffs of breath on his cheeks. There his voice trickles soft and sweet as drops of poisoned honey on Michael’s dry lips.

"You want to die so bad? So pathetic!" He presses the tip of Michael's own sword into his shoulder and along his next words pushes until Michael is pinned to the floor. "You want out because you are the Good Son who doesn't deserve punishment? I won't free you, brother. I had to suffer so it only makes us even if you do too. This is your punishment. It will never end."

Michael gasps in pain, his body hard and his grace burns in the middle of his chest.

Lucifer wonders if in one last attempt to break free that sun would burst to consume both of them in holy fire.

He is disappointed in his expectations. Soon, with a final gasp and a breathless moan Michael goes limp on the floor, eyes rolling back into his skull, his ever-awake conscience seeking out the bliss of darkness. Lucifer allows him that much and lets his grip loose. His fingers, though, are still wrapped around Michael's alabaster skin in the form of a necklace painted red and bruised purple-black.

He leaves Michael to bleed on the floor. Heaven’s brightest’s blood pools among the shattered tiles around the silver sword.


	3. Take me to Church

 

The clamour from Michael’s end hasn’t quieted throughout the following days. There were, of course, peaks, sudden jolts, just like when the elder came to consciousness and pain flashed bright red in his shoulder when he wanted to sit up on the slippery, cold floor.

Or a mighty jerk that wants to hitch Lucifer’s brain out of his skull when one day he decides to track down Michael.

His brother just left for the first time since they have been out of the Cage and Lucifer is rightfully curious where he wanders. If it has any purpose. If it is something he could destroy. He gives Michael a head start, a chance to build up the illusion of control.

 

Lucifer touches ground softly, as if his clothes weren’t just about to scrub palm sized patches off his sensitive skin. He moves carefully, slow but with the grace of an ancient monarch.

The church he arrived in front of is mainly a tower with slender windows, tall roof jagged as if it tried to catch the airy veils of the clouds. Backlit by the pale sun it is almost pretty in its human way.

He wonders if Michael attempted to get high on incense, or maybe just missed being adored for his righteous pomposity.

The wooden door creeks open at the gentle push of his hands. Even with the soft, artificial yellow light slipping on all the wood and golden foil décor Lucifer spots Michael immediately. The only person who goes stiff as the cool air sweeps through the hall; he must have caught the unmistakeable scent of winter-cold and eternal damnation Lucifer wears as a perfume.

The priest Michael has been talking to glances up and smiles at the newcomer. Lucifer smiles back. Like a snake.

He walks past the font, wonders for a second if he should dip just the tip of his fingers in the water to mock all these lunatics with their infantile hope for their prayers to be heard, but he refrains. Not because the holy water could burn his either way too sensitive skin, but because it would be simply childish on his part. He is an angel, a fallen but still glorified one, sanctified in Hell’s flames.

“May I have a question?” Lucifer asks, his voice clear but not intrusive over the low buzz of prayers. “What’s all the gold and fussy pulpit for?”

The man’s open face turns to Lucifer; his soul is honest, devoted, a bit exhausted and overworked, but the embodiment of the true servant in denial of a missing God. Poor bastard.

“A good part is gifts from our brothers and sisters in the Lord,” Father Timothy answers with a soft smile. “To show our devotion and love for our Heavenly Father.”

Lucifer glances about. It isn’t even that bad, quite moderate compared to all the gaudy cathedrals. “So it’s a way to buy yourselves into God’s good graces,” he says with a raised eyebrow. It is harder than he had thought to restrain a smile at the massive waves of hostility rolling off of Michael. “Smart choice. God loves playing favourites.”

Michael hisses as if he was stung.

“No, no, you misunderstand. There is no way to do that.” Timothy sends a slightly worried look at Michael, but he still has his back turned to them.

“But why? Isn’t it what people do, crawl in the dirt if they must in front of someone far more powerful than their miniscule minds could ever comprehend? Pay taxes, sacrifice sons…”

“That is radical. There are no more sacrifices of blood. We pay the tithe to show Heaven is on our minds.”

“Because you’re sure you deserve to get there.”

“You need to lead a life worth for salvation, but yes, we have a chance. The doors to Heaven have been opened.”

“They are closed, under seven seals.” Father Timothy’s eyes round, he gapes at the conviction in Lucifer’s voice. His mouth just opens to protest, but Lucifer cuts him short. “There might have been a time, yes, when you were worthy, but ever since Men experienced that there are no boundaries to free will? From that first bite you’ve been damned.”

“See, this is where you are wrong, son. The sacrifice of Christ has given us a new chance. It’s all about faith in this new chance.”

“Why have faith in a God who has lost hope in all his work?” Lucifer asks, a bit bitter on the surface, but the heart of a volcano simmering beneath. “Humans became the new favourite, and so _they_ got a second chance. They were favourite over the Son of Man himself, and after all that, after no miracle’s happened God left, disillusioned in all his children. Left angels, Heaven and Earth just alike. Miracles are no more from God.”

“Still your tongue, evil spirit!” Michael snarls turning to Lucifer.

Father Timothy looks shocked, scandalized.

“What bigoted nonsense is that?” Lucifer asks miming shock; then he chuckles nervously with a tinge of relief. “If I were such devil shan’t I’ve been stopped at the threshold, Father?”

“I—yes, but..?”

“God has abandoned his angels in sake of humans, because he expected them to be more after His heart. He supposed they didn’t have darkness, no flame in their core just dust, and blood, and Life.” Lucifer smiles. “He never learnt his favourites would see Him for what He truly is. That His divine plans were _cruel_ all along!”

Michael’s eyes burst into golden flames as he launches at Lucifer.

“You, Satan, have no right!” he growls as he tackles Lucifer to the hard floor.

Was he human he would certainly break an elbow in his fall if not his skull, but he just has the power to grab Michael’s arm and keep the silver blade out of harm’s way. Just to make both of them look no stronger than any other person shooting to their feet among the waves of shock.

“Help!” Lucifer cries for theatre’s sake.

The chaos, the swarm of bees is music in his ears.

“Didn’t you want to fight, Lucifer?”

One of Michael’s hands slipped from Lucifer’s grip and now the iron fingers curl around his throat. Black spots start to dance in his vision the next time he blinks.

“Take responsibility for your actions!” Michael easily throws a man into one of the benches that heroically tried to wrestle him off Lucifer. “You’re revolting. Taint everything you’re jealous of.”

_It’s clarity_ , Lucifer smirks faintly for only his brother to see as two other men charge at the lunatic with a knife. _It’s light I bring, Michael, just as Father had issued. Just as_ you _had issued when you named me._

Before it could grow suspicious why he hasn’t blacked out yet, Michael is finally hauled off the blond.

Lucifer allows the mortals to fuss about him, ask if he is all right, while he wonders where the spirit has gone from Michael all of a sudden. He wonders why Heaven’s most terrifying weapon lets these specks of dust wrangle the sword from his grip – something no self-respecting soldier would ever allow – and also comply when the police officers barge in, steps and cries bouncing from wall to wall, and put handcuffs on him.

Honestly, Lucifer is _so_ disappointed in his brother.

Why wouldn’t Michael unleash the fire storm that’s memories still make sweat bead on Lucifer’s skin? Why didn’t he unfold his wings for everyone to feel their scorching heat? Why, when with a single beat of them he could annihilate all gold, wood, brick and stone?

He keeps on wondering as he brushes away the medical help checking on his trachea and reflexes, and even as he goes through the police’s questioning pulling IDs out of thin air, and a backstory in which he had never seen the lunatic that just attacked him.

After a while he grows bored. So he stashes the curiosity at the back of his conscience and rather tries to restrain himself from sneaking into Michael’s mind, hungry to know how he would get out of the situation. When once Lucifer cannot sit on his hands any longer and prods through their link he catches glimpse of Michael’s hands clasped and cuffed on a table in front of him, while his head hangs, staring begrudgingly at his lap while he concentrates real hard on some documents that would authorize him for the ownership and public carrying of a sword. Then all is consumed by raging fire.

Michael is still pissed. He is shaking with anger.

But he is also determined to keep an act of being ordinary.

 

It takes twenty-four hours for Michael to get back. Meanwhile Lucifer has grown so bored that he started to pick at the blistering skin at the inside of his elbow as he tries to keep the uncomfortable thrum of warmth swarm at the back of his skull.

When Michael tiredly stops in the doorway Lucifer quickly pulls the sleeve of his shirt down. He cracks a grin at the dark raincloud of tiredness looming over Michael.

“Finally burnt down the police station?” Lucifer asks sitting up without showing any fear of his brother’s highly likely outburst. “Are you on the run, a sinner yourself at last?”

Michael’s expression sharpens.

“You think I didn’t know?” he asks.

“I think you don’t know a lot of things,” Lucifer gives it back with a one-shouldered shrug.

“Your arrogance, Lucifer, _that_ was your downfall.”

Lucifer swallows down a pitying snort. Really? Does Michael really have to come with this?

“One of us was destined to fall. That is your argument? Do you think I haven’t given just the thought of a thought that it could have been me?” There is something dark crippling at the depth of Michael’s eyes; something sinister that should be locked away in the farthest corner of Hell. _Too much fire, too much darkness._ “But it was you.”

There is something crippling up along Lucifer’s spine. And then at the knob below his neck the spiders with the needle legs turn into hot rubies and they roll back to pool at the small of his back.

“Because being the brightest – the most beloved wasn’t enough.”

It feels like his brain started simmering and his blood boils in his veins.

“Greedy you are. Like a child in the middle of a tantrum. My love, my praise wasn’t enough? The Host adoring you wasn’t enough? And look now what do you have!”

The fine blue veins turn purple; bubbles emerge ready to burst through the thin pale skin.

“You chose to fall. You chose this life. You ripped off the golden feathers, you threw us all away. You made yourself into a monster. Your choice.”

_What, all of a sudden Michael became a great believer of free will?_ Lucifer wants to spit the words into Michael’s face, see as he crumbles under the blood gushing down his face at their edge, and how he screams in frustration that all his previous arguments are turned invalid by his own attempts at humiliating Lucifer—

But of course this is the moment his body betrays him.

Lucifer’s vision swims. In a blur the night sky turns the colour of blood, flames crawl high from the TV and leash out from the cabinets. The sun has devoured the Earth, and he cannot do anything but suffer through the convulsion of his dry, blistering throat as his lungs expand with the scorching oxygen-les air until they threaten to burst his too tight ribcage.

His nails break on the floorboards. The heat waves keep coming back crashing over his head until he is about to black out by this ridiculously torturous aftershock of their abrupt leave from the Cage. Hell is still desperately clinging to its run-away archangels.

Eyes dry, vision blurred Lucifer more like imagines than actually sees Michael’s dark fire-middling form sink to one knee in front of him. The sun-kissed marble finger under his chin melts into his skin, and so does the mouth sealed to his without half an inch of fissure for a breath to escape.

Michael exhales, forces all the air from his own lungs down Lucifer’s protesting throat.

It is hot, but not as dry as the one that circulates in his own body. Lucifer isn’t sure if he could take a brush of cold or if that would just simply cut his windpipe to shreds.

Relieved by its newly reclaimed functions his body simply shuts down after the shock.

Exhausted but still in possession of his seething anger Lucifer truly expects Michael to not simply leave him there passed out on the floor, but kick him in the face, hell, break a few bones in retaliation for all the suffering his little scheme had put his brother through.

Instead, time ticks by.

Second by second, and Lucifer’s heart strives to match its pace with the emotions simmering in the pit of his stomach. He can still feel Michael’s presence looming over him. What is he waiting for? Searching for the words to finish his lecture about how Lucifer is a monster? A disgrace?

When he feels Michael’s arms sneak under his armpits and knees Lucifer’s heart nearly skips to a halt. When he is lifted up with little to no effort he wishes he had passed out. When the elder adjusts his hold on his brother so that he wouldn’t bump his head in the stairway’s railing he wants to die out of mortification.

By the time he is lowered onto his bed he simply wishes Michael would leave soon. He doesn’t want to stare at those darkened noble features any longer now that his tongue is heavy as lead.

After a pause Michael tells Lucifer, “Try and rest. Your vessel will be over it by tomorrow.”

And that’s it. Michael finally walks out the door without casting a glance back at his paralyzed brother.


	4. Divided We Fall

 

After this Lucifer is ready to tear down the whole property, house, garden, roses, fence and everything he had found interesting in the moment when he just wanted a hiding place both during the Apocalypse and while battling the after effects of being abruptly pulled from the Cage. This time there were no 66 seals to accustom the archangels to the outside world. It was like the stitches being torn from a wound running from pelvic to clavicle. He could distract himself the first few days by putting Michael through as immense pain that he would question whether he had gotten out at all, but now that it was brought back to the surface? All Lucifer can do is clench his teeth and not scratch holes into the flesh of his dissolving vessel.

It has been too nice to be true. These human meatsuits! Like filling lava into paper cups.

He is bleeding grace. Vibrant lightning colour scorches the blankets and mattress until it all turns sickening black and the smell of burning meat is too much to bear. Barely in time, Lucifer manages to haul himself over the edge of the bed; his body is suffering through convulsions while the few drops of sour bile he retches up gather on his dry tongue.

It is humiliating.

But it is even worse how he cannot decide if he wants to cling to the thrill of rage licked by eternal flames from that realm on the brink of existence, or if he just wants to curl up and writhe through the pain.

Hourly Michael stops in the doorway, leans against the frame, and just stands there, watching. Lucifer can always feel the weight of his gaze no matter where he is slumped over his burnt bed.

This helps him decide how much he hates Michael. Also, how much he wants him to suffer through the same aftershocks of being jerked through seething iron bars.

 

Sometimes he cannot stand the stench in his room anymore. So he struggles to keep himself on shaking feet, and, leaving bloody slide marks, he shuffles his way around the corridors – wheezing and gnashing teeth his mind set on revenge.

Once, Lucifer finds Michael in the kitchen. The table is covered by newspapers, columns circled by red marker.

Michael glances up, his eyes the colour of the emerald sea. Sunlight dances in his messy hair, but it paints no shadow over his forehead at the bloody mark Lucifer leaves on the doorframe.

“I dig your new hairstyle,” Lucifer remarks; sharp gaze skidding through the marked ads.

Michael stays silent.

Lucifer jerks his chin at the articles in front of his brother. “Planning to move away?” he asks casually.

“As soon as you get better,” Michael answers tightly.

“Oh, but you haven’t outlived my hospitality just yet, dear brother.”

 

Lucifer gets better quick after that.

It takes him a lot of thinking, calculating and a rather bloody call, but next morning he is sitting at the kitchen table mug in hand and daily papers open at an article about multiple fires that broke out the previous night. All small, moderate, for rent apartments. Police suspects arsonist activity. Investigation started.

When Michael peeks his head in the room, he frowns. Lucifer smiles at him, bright like the morning.

“Have you seen the news yet?” he asks, almost cheerful. A sip from his cup leaves his lips blood red, which he wipes back to pale pink with the swipe of his tongue.

Michael’s mouth pulls to a sour line. “Something stinks,” he says.

“Probably you,” Lucifer gives it back. “Nearly as bad as all the gore dripping over the hellfires.”

The elder snorts. He doesn’t even comment, just steps over the threshold. His long sleeved grey shirt is clinging to his shoulders and chest with fading patches of sweat darkening the material around the collar.

“Too afraid to ask me to spar with you?” Lucifer goes on, as Michael nears him at a steady, careful pace. He feels like being hunted. It’s thrilling. “So instead you go out and train with this human scum?”

Not that surprisingly he receives no answer. Michael doesn’t even question how Lucifer knows where he was or what he’s been doing. He might even be aware of the fires that burnt down all the apartments, sometimes even the whole building, he had marked the other day among the ads. Each and every one of them are now a black hole. He maybe knows that he cannot run away from Lucifer. The Devil just won’t have that. Maybe he has already surrendered to the idea of his sparring partner’s mauled body found by her own colleagues. Humans are humans. Even for Michael.

“You hold back too much. One blow could break all that woman’s bones. How would you talk yourself out of murdering a police officer, hmm? Do you think they’d try and charge you with racism on top of your religious fanaticism?”

Michael’s expression is set when he towers over Lucifer.

The younger only smiles up at him, sweet and challenging, and innocent as a pretty little lamb.

He is about to lift his cup for a mock cheer, so sure that behind the metal blinds Michael’s temper is worked up to the brink of bursting, when it is a warm hand wrapping around his fingers. The next second they are both clenching on broken shards of porcelain. Dark blood is weeping down the table. Thick droplets break on the floor.

“Demon blood? _Really_?” Michael asks coldly.

“See what you have done?” Lucifer shoots back, entirely unimpressed and a bit irritated.

“Is there more?”

“What if there is?” Michael turns his head, eyes skimming along the lines of empty cupboards. “Humans drink all kind of poisons every second and you don’t give a damn.”

Michael rips the door of the fridge open, reaches in and pulls out a plastic can. “Do you want to _cure_ yourself with _this_?!” he dangles the jug in Lucifer’s face. The blood sloshes around inside with a sickening sound. “It’s disgusting. How can you even stand this smell?”

Michael unscrews the lid—

Lucifer stiffens in his seat. “Well, excuse me that I don’t want my vessel to spontaneously combust!”

—steps over to the sink, “It’s not your grace, Lucifer—“

“What are you doing?!”

At a clean-cut wave of his hand Lucifer crashes back in his seat and along with his chair into the opposite wall.

“It’s your own iniquity burning through.”

The blood gushes down the drain.

Lucifer bares his teeth in a snarl, gaze linked with Michael’s cold one. “Do you want me to get on my knees for you? Beg for forgiveness? When _I_ was wronged?!”

“It’s time for atonement.”

“ _Not for me!”_

Breaking free from the heavy shackles of gravity Lucifer swings his arms and Michael flies through the window. Glass shards are lining his spine and circling his forehead like a halo. Lucifer easily strides toward him. An easy blow, and the last memories of the window are splinter and shimmering dust crunching under his shoes as he steps out on the grass. He holds one leg of his chair in hand, but as he walks the bat morphs into a long line of ice-lined wood; a sword.

“How about you, though?” he asks casually. “Anything to confess, Michael?”

He obviously wasn’t quick enough for his first blow to come with the aid of surprise. Michael has regained his sense of balance, glass drops fall from his face as he rolls away and back to his feet. He doesn’t look shaken at all. Well, apart from the tiny red streaks down his temple. The pole he picked up from the ground fits effortlessly in his palm.

“You shouldn’t worry about me,” Michael says with the air of arrogance wavering around him, “ _Little brother_.”

This comment, the belittling tone sets Lucifer’s teeth on edge.

He doesn’t wait for his brother to position his sword and then just let Lucifer run into it. With one powerful flap of his wings he disappears to then turn up right behind Michael, ready to bring his sword down on his shoulder, crashing bone and tearing muscle with his force. However, Michael isn’t General of the Host for no reason. Lucifer’s weapon is still high in the air, not even mid-blow; Michael turns, with his free hand grabs his arm and twists until he is thrown off balance, stumbling to the side.

For a beat of the moment Michael seems to wait.

It is only enough, though, for Lucifer to turn back towards him, but then Michael is launching his own attack.  The force of a tornado is straining his muscles, and Lucifer just has the chance to pull his sword up into a defensive position. Michael’s blow rattles his bones, his shoulder ache from the ferocity of an earthquake. But, as if he was just playing around, training, his brother dances back easily. Again, and again he charges then pulls back. His movements seem effortless, like back in the old days.

Except they aren’t.

Lucifer finds a small glitch in the impenetrable chain mail. One drop, only one he is lucky to notice. Risking a hit to the arm he brings his sword down in an elegant arc, and with a last-minute twist of his wrist he catches Michael on the left side just above his hips.

This trips the elder off balance. With a groan he falls in the dirt.

Bitterly sucking his teeth Lucifer marches up to Michael, who tries to lift his stick from the ground, but his tightening grip only aids Lucifer to break it in half with one step.

“I don’t _worry_ about you,” he says. The earth shudders as Michael rolls away from his kick. Instead the ground dents under his heel. “Maybe about what you’ll do without your precious _orders_. Really. What will you do, Michael?!”

The next kick finds target in Michael’s sternum. He doesn’t get to appreciate his victory however. Even though his brother fell to the side at the repeated kicks, the crippling pain of tearing organs hasn’t flashed through his system to blind him, so he kicks Lucifer in the knee to rile him back.

By the time Lucifer’s lightning eyes flash up again, Michael has pulled himself back on his feet, one end of his stick-sword in each hands.

The Morning Star’s lips curl into a dark smirk. The sight brings him to an odd feeling of tranquillity. Excluding the blood and the sweat shining on his skin, Michael looks just like when he had trained all their brothers and sisters up in Heaven. Brows drawn, jaw set, determined and serious, but not deadly so.

“Are you trying to teach me a lesson?” Lucifer asks softly.

“Nothing you could understand,” Michael answers in kind.

“Try me.”

Michael shifts his feet, raises his weapons, before he opens his mouth to speak:

“Forgive me brother. For I have abandoned you.”

Peace suddenly gone, fury flares in Lucifer.

How dare Michael mock him on that sterile tone?! Lucifer knows faking remorse, pulling and twisting at his own inner darkness that he would look like he is sorry, compassionate and understanding for other’s suffering. Now, he just wants to put Michael through as much as possible. Tire him out, _exhaust him_ , until taking a sagging breath hurts, until blinking against the stinging blaze of a sun is true agony. And only then, only when he is begging to be torn apart and never put back together shall he try and plead for Lucifer’s forgiveness.

Michael could serve his penitence in Hell for centuries, suffer through the horrors of the Cage and Lucifer would never forgive him!

He doesn’t know how much of this inner hailstorm has slipped through his mouth throughout their fight. It is more like a dance. The only one where Lucifer might admit on his weaker days that he is the one lacking in grace.

Dodge, and charge, one step here, and elegant swipe of the feet there, roll and sidestep; their swords kiss with dull clanks.

Michael, though fighting with shorter weapons doesn’t seem worried about evading Lucifer’s cutting cold blade.

Only few knew that at the beginning of time Michael had trained with two swords. They were never twins, no. One was a pillar of flame, much like himself, and the other was unbreakable steel with the eternal words of _Loyalty_ and _Justice_ carved upon them. Lucifer remembers how he had watched the waltz of silver and burning gold, young and bright-eyed, and so blind. Then he didn’t know that one of those swords were supposed to go through his own heart.

Now the sight only fuels his resolve to break Michael. So that he would never attempt to hold his beloved sword, or to lie to Lucifer.

In crescents the sparkly ice rips through the air; it is shattered in a million pieces but they still hang by a thread.

As time has gone by, Lucifer missed to realize that Michael has lured him closer and closer, until he brings down a blow with the butt of his sword in Michael’s face, yet, somehow blinded by vibrant red pain, Michael still manages to flip their position.

Suddenly the burning hatred is swallowed up by the black hole that opens in Lucifer’s guts, and he is going down, down, until he falls to the ground, head pounding. Under the heat of adrenaline everything hurts. Something is burning.

As he tries to smooth down his bunched up shirt one wing of it is ground black charcoal sticking to his sweaty palm.

Michael just _blasted him away_!

 “Don’t… Get away from me!” Lucifer snarls hurt and vicious. He isn’t tricked like this! He _cannot_ be tricked like this!

Despite all effort, his limbs are shaking uncontrollably, he cannot coordinate them long enough to put just an inch of distance between him and Michael. The gaze in the bruised face is intense, a wild, radiant green like the ocean that stretches over betraying evidence of fierce storms.

Lucifer makes one last attempt to push himself up from the ground, but soon it is Michael’s solid weight straddling his middle that keeps him in place. He expects the firm, suffocating touch of a blade to his throat, repaying the favour from those nights prior. Instead, a warm hand cups the side of his face and pulls Lucifer up into an awkward half sitting position. His body obeys. Foreign power cruises his veins keeping the Fallen where Michael wants him to be.

Michael leans down and kisses Lucifer on the mouth.

Surprise, then a burst of electricity stills his heart.

The next time his tongue flickers out, to gain more time for a snap back, or to chase Michael’s taste on his lips he will never know for sure, but he finds that the blistering scar is gone. The only blood he savours tastes like copper and sun-kissed warm soil. It is Michael’s.

His brother leans up, brows pinched into a scowl.

“I can still taste the demon blood on your breath,” he says. “It’s disgusting.”

And Lucifer can taste salt on Michael’s skin, exhaustion and insistence for oxygen on his breath. Michael has tired. If Lucifer swallows down the gagging fury he can see it in his brother’s movements too. There is the strain of muscle as he pushes himself back on his feet, his shoulders are squared by pure will, head is hanging by two degrees as he leans his sticks carefully against the wall.

It was a training, playful little fight. Nothing compared to the Apocalypse. Yet Lucifer has been defeated. Yet Michael has tired.

Still on the ground, Lucifer shouts after Michael’s retreating back. “You didn’t only abandon me!” He chuckles maliciously. “Did you rebel, Michael? You didn’t kill me. You left Heaven!” Michael doesn’t stop on his way inside. Just as he opens the door Lucifer’s voice thunders through the air, sure that the elder could not miss it, “I’ll make sure you’ll _never_ return!”


	5. A mourning star

A fierce shower of stars sets fire to the sky around the Earth. The second time already this year. It is only a matter of dawn when fanatics set out on their missionary tour to preach that the End Is Nigh. Maybe this time they will be right. Even if the comets racing to burn to ashes are only Michael’s flowers of forget me nots. All of them bear power, the name of a fallen angel.

All of them.

Whether they had fallen in battle fighting for Lucifer’s prideful cause, or during the Apocalypse in effect they all fell from Grace. And then there are so much more, that Lucifer cannot help but wonder if all of their brothers and sisters—If all of them had died for their quarrel…?

An endless list thrums through their link.

                                                                

 

Lucifer also remembers quite a lot of their brethren, but Michael really does know them, _all of them_ , by name. It is painful. Some names ring with the stifled roll of a mighty thunder, some just follow the rest with the resigned ache of loss.

Everybody is forced to watch the little flowers melt into burning comets, wings burning, graces bursting, as Detroit and the surrounding roads have been all cut off from the electric supplies. Not even torches work. Nothing that would ruin the mourning of the oldest of Heaven, who once had trained and loved all those passed away.

Michael’s grace is stretching over the area like an enormous, sparkling wire guard.

Lucifer watches him sitting in the soft dirt, back ram rod straight as he softly sings the oldest hymn he had first sung before Lucifer had taken the lead from him for the praise of God. The words crumble in his throat until he is choking on them. For a moment the hundreds of flowers still on his fingertips. The praise dies on his lips. It is silent all above and below the heavens.

“It could have been avoided,” Lucifer says gently. Michael’s breath hitches, he goes dead still. “We could have stopped this all from happening.”

“You didn’t listen to reason,” Michael answers stiffly.

Of course he jumped so far back.

No, Lucifer isn’t talking about those lost in the first Civil War. They are beyond saving. They all would have been mourned by all of the remaining Host if Michael hadn’t weeded out all human resemblance of compassion and softness from his soldiers. 

Instead, Michael mourns alone for all of them.

“ _You_ didn’t listen to reason,” Lucifer corrects, his sad blue eyes trained on Michael’s back. “Raphael. Uriel, Zachariah, Anael. Should I list them further? You could have saved them, Michael. Only you didn’t listen to me. I offered you to walk off the chessboard. You could have stopped all the fighting.”

“Is it all my fault, then?”

Lucifer doesn’t need to put into words how the answer is yes. How _everything_ is Michael’s fault. So instead he says, with sadness deeper than the ocean’s deep, “You rejected me.” _Again._

Surprisingly, Michael’s shields are all down. Defences that are usually harder to penetrate than for the greatest sinner to enter through the Pearly Gates are nowhere to be found. Doors wide open, walls pulled down, Lucifer’s words flow in with no resistance bringing cold, silky poison into the dry heat of the vaults.

Just a deep breath—

Then the next second, just as the lungs are filled with black water, the waves of Michael’s grace collide over Lucifer’s head, engulfing him, stifling him, and he is thrown out of the other’s mind as the sea crashes on the rocks of the shore.

For a moment he doesn’t even recognize the cold tiles his face rests on. Lucifer rises to his feet, both saddened and with the familiar burn of sadistic satisfaction at Michael’s pain. He is about to turn away, his work done for the day, but as his gaze falls upon Michael, he finds he cannot turn his eyes.

_A lone mourning star._

Was this how it must have felt for the sun to be surrounded by all its glimmering little siblings so far, far away, untouchable in the distance while its only console is the familiar glow and the knowledge that they will eventually share the same fate?

Lucifer cannot help but wonder if Michael would mourn his death just like this. If he had mourned his loss all those years ago.

 


	6. Something broken

After that night of calm and softening Lucifer forcefully reminded himself how much he hated his brother. Thus he has become Michael’s shadow; only more faithful, a malicious sweet voice even on the greyest of days, tirelessly seeking for the tiniest of cracks on the other’s armour. Just a single sign of sloppiness in the sacred procedure of putting on the golden mail, and Lucifer immediately slipped a poisoned little knife in there.

No walls, no doors, no growl or groan could deter Lucifer this time.

Obviously, the fine art of torture and teasing resulted in occasional clashes, because if Michael lacked in anything, apart from individual and creative long-range thinking, then it was the patience of the saints when it came to Lucifer.

One time after some shoving and breaking a commode in the lobby Lucifer easily slammed Michael up against the wall; he almost spilled his brother’s brain on the pale wallpaper.

For a second Michael’s eyes seemed to roll back in his skull just as the taunting anger stilled in Lucifer at the sound of Michael’s head denting the wall.

But then the button was pushed and the play went on. Michael snarled. Lucifer smirked. Next moment the blond was thrown over the railing, and by the time he gathered his limbs among the splinter and spilled guts of the seating pillows of the sofa Michael was gone.

This should have been a warning sign then. Only that split second was just enough for the sly lurking feeling of _something is wrong_ to be awoken.

Maybe if he hadn’t brushed it off so simply, he wouldn’t be so shocked, frozen in the doorway at the sight in front of him under the soft veil of nightfall.

That morning Lucifer took a flight. It was marvellous pain to finally be able to spread his wings and not worry for the additional burns, the trickle of electricity when the feathers brushed the Cage’s bars. Also Michael’s pathetic agonizing didn’t reach him like this. It was ridiculously petty how much the elder worried about keeping track of prayers.

He landed on a beach. Deserted, untouched. Everything was bathing in the golden white light of the blazing sun. The ocean glimmered in the same colours as Michael’s eyes did in the morning—

_Oh_.

Lucifer made a face.

The plates beneath the shore shifted, grumbled, groaned, then cracked. Deep, deep under the sea.

He was getting way too obsessed with his brother if he kept note about the appearance of that human visage.

Creating a new island could be a nice distraction. Maybe even channel some oil or gas into the seabed. Then he could watch how the humans would threaten to wage war for the new terra nullius. Let’s see how far he should get the magma to spill to the surface—

Then it suddenly hit him.

The silence.

It was only the deep roar of the ocean, the sound of stars and galaxies turning, the whisper of the clouds passing above – but the cracking of the familiar distant flame had vanished. A void remained, again, that no scream of billions and billions of the damned could fill.

Lucifer rushed back to Detroit, the high winds tore through his hair and whistled into the black holes stretching among the fabric of chaos on the threads of his wings. He easily kicked in Michael’s door.

And now… Now he just stands there. Shocked.

It is like how people must have imagined balancing at the edge of the Earth, staring into the vast expanse of space and nothing.

The room is so scarcely furnished. A desk, a chair, a dresser, a bed... And on the bed, Michael stretched out. Still. Breaths softly puffing on his parted lips.

Finally, he frowns, and, annoyed with the lumpish movement of his legs, he nears the bed.

“Michael?” he calls out.

It feels like entering a tomb of the great kings of old.

“Hoping for hibernation? Pass the time quicker?” Lucifer says, but the words come out more of a hiss.

His shadow is sharp and dark over Michael’s form. Lucifer reaches out to shake him, but he quickly snatches his hand back as if burnt. The skin under his palm was clammy and cold, and there was no thrum of blood underneath he could feel. Swallowing back the nausea that suddenly threatened to spin the world out from right under his feet Lucifer touches two fingers to the column of Michael’s throat. Barely, but there is something. Even if a butterfly’s wings beat harder than the other’s pulse.

The temptation is so great to just wrap his hands around the marble line of the neck and squeeze to snap Michael out of this stupid game, but then something catches his eye.

                                                                  

Several boxes are lined on the night-stand.

Frown deep over his brows Lucifer takes a look at one. It’s empty. In fact, all of them are empty.

_Painkillers…?_

In a dash Lucifer is back at Michael’s side. Too pissed to think about acting gently, he pushes his hand, fingers splayed on his brother’s chest. Concentrating his blinding cold grace into the touch Lucifer tries to seek out the burning sun that is Michael in that ridiculously small vessel, but he doesn’t find it.

Nearly breaking the ribs under his palm Lucifer pushes further, deeper into the abyss in the core of the meatsuit, but it is still as if he was in the greatest depth of space, a void with no stars, only a tiny flicker of golden dust twinkling in the far distance. There is no use in healing. It just – _doesn’t work!_

On the verge of breaking down into agonizing fury, Lucifer grabs the limp body and drags Michael into the bathroom, cursing in tongues all the short way, wondering what had gone wrong?!

When he attempts sneaking into the nervous system, there at least is a warm presence but it pushes Lucifer back!

Having no better idea Lucifer sends a bolt of lightning with the force of a cosmic storm into Michael’s slackening heart, and as the muscles convulse he pushes his fingers down Michael's throat untilhe is retching up painkillers and bile.

After the first few waves of gagging Michael seems to come to himself, his own limbs working on their own, and he empties the last drops of the content in his stomach into the toilet.

With a pitiful whine and groan, and Lucifer’s unconscious help, Michael struggles onto his shaking feet and slumps over the sink. He is wheezing, occasionally splutters when he cannot pull his head far out of the stream of the rushing water.

The smell of vomit mingles with the fake-clean scent of cold chlorine.

It is Lucifer’s stomach that turns.

"Wah- what... What happened?"Michael croaks out for the third try.

He doesn't have enough strength to even lift his head. He doesn't want to look at his own horrid reflection in the frigid mirror.

" _What happened_?"Lucifer repeats, his voice carefully measured, the perfect concoction of cold, condescending and disgusted. "You tried to take a coward's way out that's what happened."

"Don't, please, don't shout," Michael groans miserably.

"I'm not shouting," Lucifer snaps back; even though his voice bounces among the walls of the bathroom almost at the roar of thunder.

A deeply rooted frustration makes him restless. He cannot keep standing idly any longer. Still suckling at his teeth he places one hand on Michael's hip, the other is curled into a vice-like grip around the other forearm; he half drags half supports Michael to stumble back into his room.

The stench isn't much better there.

Lucifer only has to let go of his brother and he is sitting on the bed. Just like a kicked puppy. Or maybe a scolded child.

"Undress," Lucifer barks going through the discarded, rumpled clothes lying about in the wardrobe. There is no way he would stand this bile and decay smelling attire. They are going to burn nicely.

He pulls out a T-shirt, and without turning throws it at Michael, then turns back to the closet. When he doesn't hear the sound of rustling clothes his eyes flash around.

Michaels hasn't moved ever since.

"What's wrong, Michael?" Lucifer asks softly with an evil smile. "Have you flushed your brain down the toilet too? Can't take orders anymore? What'll happen to you now, you poor imbecile baby?"

The bed barely dips under his weight. Even though Michael's skin is still an unhealthy greyish blue colour, from this close Lucifer can feel the heat growing stronger in its flaming.

Lucifer edges closer - anxiety gripping his stomach but driven by some sadistic/grotesque curiosity.

"Or would you rather _I_ undressed you? Gently as a lover?"

A tremor shakes Michael's entire body. The elder tries to lean away ( _You're disgusting_ ) but he cannot move. There is no way to save that entire universe that freezes and melts again and again into sweet oblivion between their thighs lined up.

Lucifer scoffs out a chuckle.

He waves his hand. "What will it be? Come on, get changed. You stink even worse than the day before."

Yet Michael only keeps on staring ahead. Lucifer is about to propose his genius idea to crunch the shirt and jacket into powder snow while they are still on Michael, but then, as if on cue, he seems to get a hold of himself and shake off the spell.

It takes him a few seconds to wrestle his arms out from the jacket's sleeves. Then the shirt gets off, even though easier, it still takes a small eternity as far as Lucifer is concerned. But then time stops, turns into an abstract idea that simply flows through one’s fingers. A thousand years could pass by, even slower than down in the endless Pit, and Lucifer would still be falling, falling, _falling_...

                                                                                             

Michael's back and shoulders are severely scarred. Burnt. There is disgusting dead brown, sickening yellow and unhealthy pink and white at the edges. Even through his swimming vision, as Michael's head hangs between his shoulders, the scars slowly take shape. They form a pair of mutilated wings.

"What's this?" Lucifer croaks. His voice has abandoned him.

Michael doesn't move or make any indication that he has so much as heard Lucifer's question.

"Michael."

The dark head softly sways from one side to the other. It could be just the play of the light.

Lucifer grabs his brother around the wrist – the scars don't go that far down, he squeezes hard enough to leave his own angry marking and get the other's attention. The green eyes flutter but stop shy from meeting Lucifer's gaze. The ice-cold fingers grip harder; Michael lets out a soft whimper.

"Don't make me ask again," Lucifer says, tone finally even once more. He sounds threatening now. "What's happened?"

Muscles work under the scarred skin, shifting in agony.

Dark fire is dancing behind thick, foggy emeralds. Michael looks Lucifer in the face, painfully direct and cruel with the naked honesty in the deep.

"We got out."

As Michael craned his neck he also left his chest unprotected, his shoulders squared on instinct and another stunning sight greets Lucifer. Only for one careless second but it is enough to freeze both of them.

At the very point where days ago Michael had directed the blade in Lucifer’s hand, little right from the beating heart, there is a burst white star criss-crossing the elder’s chest.

A bell of silence and ice-cold space overlays Lucifer; the heat prickling at his fingertips is frozen and that finally gets his muscles to work. He springs to his feet; a long lecture of how pathetic Michael is still rattles about in his brain, but he has to take advantage of this short silence before a destructive storm. This might just burn up his vessel if he isn’t careful enough.

Michael doesn’t try to call after Lucifer as he slams the door behind himself.

 

After a few hours of pacing and unconsciously digging a crater of frozen diamonds in the scorching desert Lucifer has managed to slam the heavy doors on the gruesome, writhing tentacles that still haunted miles away from the Cage. When he returns to check up on Michael, his brother is still where he had left him.

“I told you to get changed!” Lucifer snaps at him. In answer Michael squeezes his eyes shut. As if that could bar out the harsh sound. Lucifer scrunches up his nose before his expression flattens. He says, “No wonder Heaven’s a mess. You can’t even take such a simple order.” He expects Michael to snap back at him. But nothing changes. Not even the air heats up, no tiny spark flickers.

He reaches two fingers under Michael’s chin, and despite the weak protest raises his head so that he could look into his face. “Come on!” The blond hisses half a breath away from Michael’s mouth. Their noses brush. 

“ _Try and rest_ ,” Lucifer kisses the poison on Michael’s purple lips, “Your pills sure would knock you out.”

Michael finally manages to scrape up enough to focus his gaze on his brother. It is deep and dangerous like the eye of a storm through a soft layer of mist.

 

 

A great amount of sleeping later Michael took a shower and re-emerged into the world of the living. He also came back on angel radio, which partly and definitely not admittedly, eased off the knot in Lucifer’s stomach. His brother is all right and he can go back to hating him just as it was before.

So, because he wasn’t worried, he didn’t even show his face when Michael threw on his jacket and gently closed the front door behind himself.

The eldest angel returns only close to nightfall. It seems to be a time he likes being around in the rooms on the first floor. Maybe because as the orange hue of the bleeding sun turns on a purplish shade it gives his grace a sinister but so beautifully powerful glow that no gold could ever provide.

Lucifer rounds the corner and steps into the kitchen just as Michael settles the dozen of bags he had carried on his arms. Followed by Lucifer’s incredulous and confused look he methodically starts unloading them.

It takes the Morning Star some time to realize that Michael is filling in the fridge and pantry with _food_.

“I was told it’ll help the headaches,” Michael speaks up softly lining the counter with all types of fruit , limes, oranges and berries, and vegetables Lucifer doesn’t really care to list, he is so busy glaring at all the rest of cartons of juice, milk, and packages of some meat.

_What kind of headaches?_

As if sensing the daggers of his icy glare Michael adds, “I don’t know what I like yet.”

It would be the perfect opportunity for Lucifer to unleash his sharp tongue on Michael, because _really?_ An angel _eating_? Who has heard of such thing? The fact however, that all this time Michael hasn’t as much as raised his eyes to look at Lucifer, as if in terrible shame, seizes up his throat. There is no sleek word slipping by that lump.

It is abhorrence, the cold-hot sensation of disgust that knots his tongue, and forces him to turn on his heel and leave quickly. He doesn’t even think about unfurling his wings and taking flight.

Lucifer is too busy masking up the twist of worry in his guts even in front of himself to think straight.

 

He doesn’t even realize when Michael joined him out in his garden. One second Lucifer is watching a rose bud unfold its silk-like petals unable to resist the icy force of his will, then next he catches the scent of something sweet and sour, fresh, and he recognizes it as orange. It’s lingering all around Michael; a thin, champagne layer on his fingers, embedded under his short nails, and glistening on his lips.

There is the perfect opportunity to strike up a conversation, just a casual chit-chat, but Lucifer won’t relent. He will pretend that he is alone.

“We need to talk,” Michael says after a while.

“I don’t need to do anything.” Lucifer answers. “Whether you want to – that is the question here.”

Michael falls into another fit of silence. If it wasn’t for his high-and-mighty ridiculous act he surely would pout like a petulant child that Lucifer dared to ruin his moment. He crosses his arms over his chest, sets his jaw and glares. Lucifer doesn’t even have to turn to know.

“You are suffering from heat waves and flashbacks. I have my own share of _troubles_ , with getting out of the Cage.”

“Oh, and what kind are they?”

“I didn’t try to kill myself.”

Lucifer scoffs. “Sure.”

“I was in pain. A terrible headache and I couldn’t heal it, so I gathered it was the pain of my vessel. Thus I needed to cure my vessel. I was told the painkillers would work.”

“A _headache_? A headache, truly, Michael?” Lucifer nearly bursts out in incredulous laughter. “I am regularly burning alive in this forsaken vessel, and you cannot handle some hammers to the skull? Have you been just lounging around in Heaven, because you surely grew slack.”

“Don’t be concerned with that. I have more important matters to speak with you about.”

“I’m all ears.”

Just as the night swiftly descends so is it filling up with sparks. Lucifer shivers pleasantly as tiny electric bolts crack on his skin standing hairs on end.

“Do you want me to move out now?”

“I didn’t recognize you had time to hunt for another places to live at. Am I not your generous host?”

“You hate me being here.”

“Well, you were the one to tag along instead of returning to Heaven.”

Something shifts deep beneath the mask of Michael’s face.

“I’ve made up my mind.” He says, with his head held high. “I don’t want to fight you, Lucifer. I truly and honestly want to regain your forgiveness. I’ve had enough of this rivalry.”

“Even if Father was the one to create us to _fight_? To destroy each other?”

Michael doesn’t bat an eye. “I will be your brother again, but only as far as you’d let me.”

Lucifer arches an eyebrow. He isn’t sure if it is of surprise of scepticism.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They are archangels, so they are fine, but this is definitely how you DON'T handle medical overdosage!


	7. Brother’s killer

Surprisingly, it turns out Michael and Lucifer can coexist in peace. It is an Eighth Wonder of the World kind of miracle but they actually _can._

Sometimes they even manage to have actually proper conversations while not in the same room through their link. It usually happens when Michael is on one of his shopping trips (because he truly is disastrous in the kitchen and has a thing for burning his food – which only makes the headaches worse). Also Lucifer wants to know the extent of how far the elder would go in _being his brother_ again.

This once however, Michael gained the upper hand and managed to pester Lucifer into joining him to the mall.

“This is ridiculous,” Lucifer grumbles, hands shoved deep in his pockets, glaring at everyone and everything he catches sight of. “Do you think that making me mingle with this scum would placate my hatred for them?”

“No, not at all.” Michael answers, heading for the vegetables’ row. “I’m a realist, if anything.”

“You are an _idiot_ if anything.”

Michael doesn’t take it personally. Quite unusually, but then again, he is trying beyond his abilities not to tear his brother to shreds when he is in a teasing mood.

“How is your garden?” he asks instead.

“What do you care?”

“I’m attempting what they call ‘small-talk’.”

“If that’s all the reason you dragged me here, then I’m done.”

A warm hand settles on the bare skin just below his elbow.

“Come on, Lucifer,” Michael says, “I’m truly interested.”

That little smile is infectious. Sooner than thought ever possible Lucifer is sharing _everything_. How his only hobby aside from cursing their Father is tending to his roses. Or maybe gardening in general, because Hell has always been a scarce and brimstone filled place with little to no chance at reclaiming anything he has once lost. He just manages to swallow down the heartfelt revolting confession of how it is a painful reminder of the days and years they had spent with Michael in the Garden, only the two of them before Man came into the divine picture. Instead he almost shyly hints how he might be thinking about getting other kinds of plants one day. Fruit trees maybe…

And Michael is listening. Walking through rows, taking painstakingly long to pick with great care whatever he fancies, but all along he is _listening_. Like never before. Like Lucifer entirely forgot he could.

( _If only he listened when Lucifer came to him practically on his knees. Begging.)_

If it wasn’t for the buzz of the freezing counters, the fluorescent lamps and the whining of other customers Lucifer might cherish the hope that the past isn’t entirely lost.

 

By the time he finished wondering how it is possible to pay for all this stuff with a piece of plastic card, tension returns to hang between them.

It only erupts when Michael casts a quick glance back over his shoulder, and tells Lucifer tightly to go ahead, and even whelmed down with all his shopping bags he slips away as if on wings.

If he didn’t make it sound such an order Lucifer might consider following along. Instead, he curses under his breath, and follows the pale trail Michael has left.

He doesn’t have to go far. Behind the mall there is an alley or maybe a smaller parking lot rather. It isn’t that much of a scene from a criminal series.

_Yet_ – a voice buzzes at the back of his skull.

Lucifer is about to round the corner and demand answers, when he catches words drifting in the air.

“… to see you!” Exclaims a man with the thrill of a child who just saw his parents after a long time.

Michael’s voice, in turn, sounds flat, carefully measured, “Who ordered you to Earth in such numbers?”

“We follow Bartholomew after Naomi died,” a female voice answers, much more briskly. She must be the leader, though Lucifer doesn’t know of how many angels. How did they find them anyway?

“Naomi’s dead?” Michael, of course, is busier going through the angels and their ranks from his time to find out who else is dead that someone like Bartholomew had taken leadership.

“And all the angels are now divided in factions.”

“With due respect, Michael,” she says. “We are in dire need of your leadership. You could unite us and lead us back to Heaven.”

Michael pauses. “I’m not playing by that role anymore.” He says, tone final.

The air grows thick with the flare of confusion, shock and stifled desperation.

Lucifer picks this moment to peek around the corner. There are three angels; one old, balding man, a stern-looking woman in a grey suit and a featureless little man. Michael stands in front of them, tall and broad-shouldered, a pillar of authority even surrounded by grey walls and containers.

The woman – Lucifer doesn’t recognize her – is spluttering reasons, the word of loyalty is hidden under the chaotic puddle of arguments as to why Michael would never abandon Heaven and the Host. Suddenly, in the middle of her rant she stops. Freezes. Her eyes flash at Lucifer.

“Is it because of _him_?!” she cries.

All heads snap his way, recognition and fear light up on the two other angels’ faces, while clouds gather over Michael’s brow. The sound of a blade slipping with a hiss out of the woman’s sleeve into her hand breaks the spell, but just the second she lounges in Lucifer’s direction, Michael quickly takes a step to block her way. Bones rattle as Michael’s forearm prevents her blow with such force that the blade nearly slips from her grasp. The hand on her chest is a bone-crashing blast. She bares her teeth, vicious and driven by fear and shocked anger equally.

“Armaita,” Michael says with a stern frown, “be wise. You know you can’t fight Lucifer.”

“But you can!” she exclaims, and holds her sword out to her General. “This is it, isn’t it?” Her eyes gleam with something far more fanatic than her tattered grace. “The Apocalypse again. That’s why you have been freed! Our fall must have been the price. You can kill him, Michael!”

The archangel takes a step back, pulling his hand away, furthest from the silver blade. “That time has passed—“

“We need order back, Michael!”

“Slavery, you mean,” Lucifer pipes in. He has stood by watching long enough.

“It’s your fault!” Armaita snaps immediately. “You must have put some spell on Michael—“

“Sister, listen,” Michael tries placating one last time, and while his command directs her gaze back at him, the mission she just drew up in her head blazes wilder than any wisdom she has ever possessed.

“We’ll free you, Michael,” she says on fanatic, unworldly trembling voice, “and you can lead us back to Heaven.”

The same instant Michael’s expression closes up and hardens, like the visor of his helmet falling shut, another angel, one that Lucifer hasn’t seen yet slips out of the formation of the three Michael is prepared to fight off with or without a weapon. The woman successfully evades Michael’s hand as he tries to catch her, and while the other three launch their attack on the Sword of Heaven, this one pounces back from the opposite wall. Before Lucifer could gauge how great threat she poses, it is already too late.

He catches sight of the bottle, the thick liquid sloshing about inside as she pulls her hand back, the smell of burning cloth, and then the bottle is flying—

When it shatters to pieces right next to Lucifer, does the memory flash with painful accuracy in front of his mind’s eyes. This is exactly what Michael had gone through at Stull cemetery, right before Lucifer went to beat Dean Winchester to pulp.

Burning holy oil covers his right arm and drops fell on his side and scorch his neck. Burning, burning, _burning_ – the shock that shakes his body is far less from the pain, he can barely feel it, and more of the memories it brings to mind. But his anger is like a flood washing over the fire.

Before his sister could run her blade through anywhere it hurts, Lucifer snaps his fingers. She is burst to bloody little pieces. Just as Castiel was. Fate of those running around with Holy Molotov cocktails in hand.

Breathing through the waves of another possibly oncoming aftershock, Lucifer finally looks down to inspect his injury. The skin on the entire length of his arm is waxy and white, charred, raised and leathery, but all together not much worse than Michael’s back. Only the smell is sickening, acrid and bitter. With an irritated huff he concentrates his grace into the spastic limb, and wonders why Michael hasn’t healed his own burnt marks, when he remembers there wasn’t only a single attacker—

Lucifer watches perplexed as in one eternally stretched-out second Michael slashes the last angel’s throat open.

Instead of blood white-blue grace is spilling through the wound. Before it could dissolve in the air, returning to be no more than light and some intangible cosmic energy Michael reaches out one demanding hand, as if expecting some payment. The grace obediently curls up on Michael’s palm like a snake snuggling into a warm rock.

Next, Lucifer has to seek hold of the brick wall, uncaring of the shock of pain that runs through his recovering nervous system, because otherwise his knees might buckle out under the appal freezing his heart.

Michael lifts his hand to his face, whispers something imperceptibly softly, then the essence of one of their brother’s is painting the eldest’s mouth and cheeks red from the inside. Immediately, without much time to swallow Michael’s own grace envelops the lesser angel’s. The blazing gold eyes squeeze shut, as if fighting some tearing pain, then in a flash it is all gone. The tension slowly slips away from Michael’s rigid spine, and he is only as stern as he ever is wearing his armour.

Time and space stands still. This is a _nightmare_.

“You just mourned the loss of hundreds of our brothers and sisters—and just now! Just now you killed three of them in cold blood!” Lucifer cannot help but cry out. This time the stunned ache is honest in his tone. He lifts his ice blue eyes on the back of Michael’s head. “Oh, something is broken in you, brother!”

Michael turns with slow, deliberate movements. No muscle twitches out of order. His gaze is hard and unforgiving as the blade he had wrestled from Armaita’s hand.

After a long pause he says, “As if you cared.”

This is not Lucifer’s brother. This is a soldier. The Sword.

Lucifer clenches his teeth; lips over them are a knife-thin sharp line. How surprised Michael would be if he knew that family is probably the last thing he cares about now and then. The bond of blood that doesn’t flow in angels but the myriad speckles of grace from all different nature, like stars on the eternal canvas of Heaven’s belly. How far has he fallen that he can rip this apart so easily?

Where did Michael throw all the loyalty he has always been clinging to?!

“It had to be done,” Michael says.

“No, it didn’t!”

Michael’s hard eyes flash at Lucifer. “Shall I remind you that you killed Gabriel for far less?” Then he turns back to the corpses – there are no burnt wings on the pavement – and with the ease of a smoker flicking the butt of his cigarette under the cars Michael shoots a spark at the empty vessels. They eat their way into the heart of the bodies, then with the famine of millions the flames lick them to ashes.

The next breeze scatters the cremains away.

“ _Far_ less?” Lucifer echoes.

“I needed information. You killed Gabriel for the same hypocrisy you, too, once fell victim to.”

 “It had to be done!”

“See?” Michael says with a dark tone that chills out Lucifer’s burning cold body.

“Don’t try to tell me you wouldn’t have done the same! You would have killed anyone who stood in the way of the Apocalypse. You would have killed me without a single trace of emotion!”

“You aren’t better than me.” Michael walks up to Lucifer; the scent of smoke trailing in his wake.

“Neither are you,” Lucifer hisses back, now against Michael’s hot mouth. “Was your precious information worth it?”

The poison in his words burn at the skin of the other’s face, but it is nothing compared to the golden fire that still glows through flesh and bone.

For a shuddering thought Lucifer is reminded of one of the countless times they sparred. One time when even though Lucifer worked up all his pride and fighting skills, and managed to prove himself as a worthy opponent Michael still slammed him up against a marble pillar with ease. Lucifer remembered the heavenly grace faintly throbbing at his back, his brother’s chest plate pushing at his own at a bruising force, and above all Michael, burning, burning like the heart of the sun above him, heaving—

Except then Michael only stared at him, gaze unreadable but overflowing with the adoration he once held for the Morning Star. Now it is heated, red-gold smouldering coal, and his lips are scorching as they press to Lucifer’s.

Their mouths clash and melt together, like freshly-wrought blades brought into fight way too soon. Lucifer’s shocked anger and Michael’s entire ocean of terrifying fire.

The brick wall dents at his shoulders but Lucifer pushes back, fights Michael’s grip on his bruised screaming arm, but all he earns is a shove that makes his wing joints moan with pain and flash with something horribly good that makes him open up to Michael’s invading tongue. That is all Lucifer takes to step up his game. One of his hands sneaks around the other’s shoulder, fingers curl in the dark strands of hair, and Lucifer grasps and pulls hard. He feels the scalp strain under his strength, and also Michael is kissing him with more teeth, sharp and punishing. His own hand winds among the blond locks. Lucifer mewls at the back of his throat. Tiny flames flicker in his hair where Michael’s hand is fisted.

Lucifer doesn’t rest until Michael’s lips are as bruised as his. He sucks and bites, fights dirty as far as his restricted body allows him, rubbing off against the elder’s warmth, straining in the heat he heightens with each crescent-roll of his hips, wondering when the flame will burst and die out.

By the time Michael tears himself away from Lucifer’s mouth their faces are smeared with glimmering gold, that slowly turns blood red oozing from the multiple puncture wounds and cuts on the brunet’s lips.

Michael wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. His brows furrow forming a deep arc over the proud line of his nose.

“You are awful to kiss,” he says, voice beautifully debauched.

Lucifer only grins, a bit out of his usual sharpness, but he will later deal with this frustrating sensation of light-headedness, as if he was high and light, just one speckle of stardust in the whole brilliant universe.

“And you kiss like it was a sin,” he counters.

Michael scoffs.

“So, what did you learn from turning into a cannibal?”

Lucifer pushes himself off the wall, and lifts his hand to wipe his own mouth, but before it touches his lips he stares down at the healed pink skin of his palm in bewilderment. There is no tiny square-inch to peel off, no reminders of the awful burns.

“Michael?”

His brother doesn’t turn, just gathers his shopping bags and starts walking away from the murder scene.

“Michael?!” Lucifer calls after him.

“I’d do anything for you, Lucifer,” Michael says, without casting a glance back over his shoulder.

“That’s not an answer. Why are… were you doing all this?” He finally rounds around the other, to stop him. “Michael?”

“I love you.”

How could Michael suddenly say this so _easily_?!

“I don’t need your love.” Lucifer growls. “Nor your healing. I can do fine on my own.”

“But it surely is convenient,” Michael insists, detached. “Why don’t you let me go then if you despise me so much?”

Lucifer thinks about the specks burning on his skin. They felt like those breaths of grace circling his entire being after all of their previous kisses. The golden grace slowly melting through his skin and entering his system without leaving a scar.  He thinks of the groundless irritation. How ages ago he would have been ecstatic to feel those very same lips lay claim on him, sharing grace in their space of intimacy.

Unfortunately, those ages have passed.

 “Doesn’t everyone cling to something they hate?” Lucifer asks back sweetly. “You haven’t served your penitence yet, dear Michael. I’d hate to hurt your so strong sense of justice.”

“Then why didn’t you leave me in the Cage?”

The implication here Lucifer doesn’t understand but it still makes his voice sound more breathless than he would feel comfortable with. “It’s a pleasure watching you suffer and toss about drowning in doubt.” But then he shoves the uncomfortable feeling stirring hotly at the back of his mind, and as the corner of his still raw lips pulls into a smirk the voice slipping past them turns silvery again. “Especially when it makes you fall into such depths.”

To his greatest surprise Michael doesn’t snap back; doesn’t start a long lecture about morals and sense of duty and Lucifer’s iniquity. He only curls a little wry smile of his own.

After a long pause, only the sound of their feet hitting the asphalt and Michael’s grocery bags rustling Lucifer speaks up again.

“Why didn’t you go back to Heaven?” he wonders, casting a side glance at his brother. “It’s not like you couldn’t slip away, there’s no way I could pull you back from there.”

“You’ve seen the state of my wings,” Michael answers, then falls into the stifled silence of grinding teeth he adds, “I can’t fly.” He almost sounds angry for a change.

“That explains why we are walking,” Lucifer says sardonically.

Michael cuts him a glare. “ _You_ don’t have to.”

“But then what says you don’t go on yet another homicidal spree? I have to look out for you, or Dad will get angry at you killing his precious little monkeys.”

“I’m not a homicidal maniac.”

“All soldiers are.”

“You know it’s not true.”

“For you it is. You don’t care that much about the race of Man, really. I sometimes have the feeling that I care more than you do. Where you’re concerned they could all go to Hell, only the Apocalypse should go down as planned.”

“They have the right to return to Father’s side. If that was planned for them.”

“Please, not this _again_. There is nothing greater bullshit than your ignorance for free will.”

Michael’s little sigh cools the steam Lucifer was working on building up for the sake of another fight that may reach a higher scale. His mouth is still pleasantly prickling, and whenever he swallows he can taste Michael on his tongue.

He can also feel the thought buzzing in Michael’s mind. _Why don’t you return to Hell to raise an army? Heaven can’t stand in your way._ The elder only doesn’t know how to get around to ask it out of the blue. Then, as he catches Lucifer twirling the thin silver line around his fingers, he blows it away with an irritated frown.

Lucifer scoffs. Now, why would he tell Michael that he simply doesn’t _want_ to go back to Hell? Hasn’t he spent more than enough time locked up in there? He is shivering just by the thought of going back and being surrounded by that filthy, obsessive bunch of savages; half of which would lie low trembling until someone comes up with a fruitless idea of a coup while the other half would pester him for Apocalypse round 2. Really, what’s the point when Michael is right there next to him without the Big Final Battle?

_Oh_. _That_ is one unsettling revelation he might not be ready to accept just yet.

Lucifer casts a wary glance at his brother.

Michael walks next to him with an expression more unreadable than Metatron’s scrawling of Dad’s orders.

 


	8. Saviour

The Cage crumbles.

In one corner, where Michael had withdrawn light and flames twirl around until there is a fortress of pure will, impenetrable walls of marble and crystal, windows of lightless roses, dull and menacing like a giant dome in the dead of the night. Lucifer marvels the construction. His awe lasts a day or a year, until it is replaced by jealousy and the old siege begins anew.

He sets his shoulder against the gates. Slams himself against the seething iron again and again, until he doesn’t know if he is screaming in pain or exhilaration of the beauty of this new twist of reality.

The fallen stars fizzle torn away into new constellations, chaos shatters into new black holes and blinding white galaxies.

The Cage trembles.

 

“Lucifer. Hush, brother, hush. You don’t need to know that. You don’t want to know that.”

 

Lucifer reaches up; his fingertip grazes the navy blue ceiling of Heavens, and carefully plucks a purple gold star. He holds it up, then sways from side to side and watches as Gabriel’s mesmerized amber eyes follow his movements. With a flick of his wrist the star pounces from his fingertip and pulling a chevelure behind lands in his palm.

Gabriel is about to reach out for it, curious and so, so easy to have over.

Quickly, Lucifer closes his fingers around the fiery globe. He crosses his fists at the wrists. Waits for his little brother to guess where the pretty, shiny thing went.

Not too far away Michael is still listening to Raphael going on and on about the rocks she had found on Earth, enthusiastically explaining the minor differences between colour and mass, the tiny creases and how to guess the age of the rubble. There is no pretence overlaying Michael’s features. He is engrossed in all their little sister’s findings. Even though he already knows it. And also so much more.

Gabriel taps Lucifer’s right hand.

“Are you sure?”

For a tiny second Gabriel seems unsettled by his big brother’s devilish charm. But then with the sullenness of the youngest he nods.

“Come on, Lucifer,” he chimes. “You’re just being evasive.”

Lucifer feigns hurt surprise. Just as he sighs resigned, Gabriel lights up. Seeming reluctant Lucifer unfolds his fingers. His palm is empty.

“No, no, you cheated!” Gabriel accuses. He grabs Lucifer’s wrist and demands the other fist to be opened too.

The Morning Star complies. It is just as empty as the other.

Gabriel wails – like he did the first time he had tripped over his own golden foil wings. He isn’t too far from re-enacting that scene as he runs up to Michael, clinging to the eldest brother’s strong arm.

“Michael, Lucifer cheated! _Again_!”

Michael wraps a soothing wing around their little brother, practically shielding him from Raphael’s glare.

“He picked the star from the sky, then made it disappear, but he couldn’t could he?” Gabriel weeps into Michael’s side. “I was watching. _Really_ watching. He is cheating! He promised he’d teach me the trick.”

Lucifer only shrugs and smiles sweetly at the questioning frown and irritated glare thrown his way.

“It’s not the whole trick, Gabriel,” Michael puts a big hand in the fledgling’s hair. “You don’t have enough patience to wait till the end.”

He twists a golden lock around his finger, then pulls it softly down, caressing behind the young angel’s ear. When he pulls his hand away, he holds it up right in front of Gabriel’s face. Between his forefinger and thumb sparkles the very same star Lucifer has plucked from Heaven’s ceiling.

Gabriel’s eyes widen.

“ _How_ did you do that?!”

Michael smiles – and it makes Lucifer smile too where he stands. It is like a second sun shining down on them.

“It requires some tactics,” Michael says, and places the tiny orb on Gabriel’s outstretched palms, “and a lot of practice.”

“As I was saying,” Raphael pipes back in squeezing closer to Michael back into his precious attention. She picks up her rant about Earth and the Moon maybe a bit more persistent then before Gabriel interrupted her.

The youngest doesn’t care. Much. He sticks his tongue out, but otherwise he is too busy marvelling at the star Michael just brought back. He is nudging Lucifer to show him the trick again. And again. And again. Until he can repeat it. (If Lucifer looks away for a long second.)

                                                                  

Listening to Gabriel’s thrilled chit-chatter Lucifer stretches his wings. One brushes Michael’s carefully folded one. It feels like being swapped away into another universe, calm and peacefully silent – the little ones’ chirping is only some distant noise. This is what Lucifer offers. And this is what Michael takes. He leans back into the Morning Star’s powder snow embrace, and folds his own wings around them for warmth and soft shadows.

Except that he is still listening to Raphael with undivided attention.

When Lucifer asks why, Michael smiles.

Because Raphael is so engrossed in her little lecture. Because she is enthusiastic in her discoveries, making connections and finding new wonders of her own. Because one day she will be the greatest healer. Because she knows the wonders of Father’s creations, even though right now she is jealous of those who will gain dominion over the Earth.

Lucifer shakes his head. He doesn’t understand why Michael would listen to all the boring details he already knows.

 

 

The gates finally fall with a burst of heat slamming Lucifer against the other side of the Cage.

Before his next attack could reach the castle walls it all collapses. Billion shards of a mirror litter the empty air, hung in their brilliant, sharp mist, and in the middle stands Michael, with the last odds and ends of his vessel clinging and thinning to the very edge of possibilities around his royal form. He is tall, grave and determined.

Lucifer snickers. Does he honestly think that there is any chance of a last showdown _here_? Well. He shouldn’t be the one to let his brother down.

The destructive dance starts again.

It’s almost boring. They have been fighting for centuries and millennia long, there certainly can’t be a move come unexpected.

It always ends the same. After crashing through layers of realities, ice and magma clinging to their forms, spears of darkness and bones stabbed in their backs eventually Michael would _always_ come out on top. Pinning Lucifer down and pressing the ever dulling blunt point of his broken sword to his throat. One silver blade unlike any other he could muster in possession of his second-best vessel. Lucifer would breathlessly spit curses at him, and Michael would either knock him out or just leave him wish for death laid out defeated and vulnerable to rise yet again as the ever revitalized spirit of negation he is.

But this time, there is something in the air that fills Lucifer with blazing rapture. It is just a thrum, a restless twang as one string holding up the corners of the universe snaps; yet the wave of sound, destructive in its gentle breeze, charges Lucifer with power and makes Michael stop for one day of a moment.

Lucifer blocks one of Michael’s blows, grabs his wrist and squeezes until the sword falls in his palm with the frozen flash of jagged lightning.

Michael is backed into one intangible wall of the Cage.

They lock gazes – he almost seems expecting, daring Lucifer to disappoint him—

He cannot kill Michael here, they heal and tear apart every second, but he has never really wanted to anyway. Just make it hurt. Stall the unbearable thirst for revenge for just one fleeting moment even if it tastes sickeningly bitter!

The sun flares up where the thunderbolt penetrates flesh, blazing gold and spills blood red, fire consumes the space; everything is burning in the explosion—

And suddenly Lucifer is falling. Only upwards—

 

 

Lucifer wakes with his heart hammering at his ribcage, ready to burst, like it wanted to give him a mark similar to Michael’s. Pressing a palm to the pounding spot he starts breathing, deep and slow forcing away the unfamiliar burn and rather concentrates on finding the bottom of his stomach. It just seems to have dropped into endless nothingness.

Was it—

— _real_?

Then as he is still struggling with the nausea, shaking fingers combing frozen drops of sweat from his hairline (he inevitably tears the peeling skin off as well, which is way beyond irritating) something else hits him with the force of a meteor sweeping past him. It makes his stomach flip in the other direction.

Driven by the familiar curiosity that never promises anything good but sinful pleasure, Lucifer rolls out of bed ( _how did he get there?_ ) and pads down, searching for the origin of the sickening smell.

The picture of Michael’s chest left wide open with a silver-gold sunburst swallowing him up is quickly blown away by the sight that greets him in the living room.

There are three bodies hanging upside down from the chandelier. Their eye sockets are only smouldering holes, throats cut, with one precise slash. Purple blood is now only dripping in fat drops into the bucket under them.

It is definitely not big enough for all that blood.

In the middle of the reeking bloodbath Michael is sitting on one arm of the sofa. There is no scratch at all on his imperial figure. He sits like one of those stone angels in cemeteries with their solemn, gentle faces and commanding posture even as they watch over the dead. The blade lying across his knees is glinting even in the dark. Clean.

There was no fight here. Only ants were squished.

Lucifer squints at the scene.

“Do I want to know what’s all this?” he asks.

Michael looks at him with the calm of the endless ocean in his eyes.

“I found them tumbling across our property,” Michael says.

 “And they call _me_ a mass murderer,” Lucifer rolls his eyes and bites down on a hiss as he feels the skin peeling at their corners.

Michael stands. The steel is slowly melting from his features as he walks up to his brother. Gently, he cups Lucifer’s cheek in a warm palm, and suddenly the skin doesn’t feel too tight anymore. Only chills chase each other along the length of the blond’s spine. It’s Michael’s grace.

“What’s with all the blood?” Lucifer asks a bit lightheaded.

“That’s for you. I gathered you wouldn’t rely on me healing you all the time.”

_Why is there sadness underlining those words?_

“I’ll leave you to it,” in passing Michael adds, “Clean up after yourself.”


	9. Counting Suns

Lucifer walks the wall surrounding the Temple Mount. He counts the gates, the towers of churches, temples, all the ants swarming the streets. It is a surprisingly familiar sight.

He has already visited the deserted wilderness, the memory of one of his biggest failures a buzzing vivid mess of pictures and noise as the Son of God had sent him away. Obviously he didn’t settle for so few words as it eventually made it to the Scriptures, but what could one expect when these failures were the scribes?

Then he could feel Michael’s heavy gaze following his retreat.

And again, an even bigger failure was when blinded by rage and bitter humiliation he made sure that the Christ was executed. Always so drunk on his revenge being fulfilled. That was Lucifer’s great weakness.

He remembers the storm gathering over whole Jerusalem, his own rage bellowing with lightning bolts striking men and stock all the same when his sole consolation prize, the eternal damnation of the whole mankind was ripped from his hands.

He remembers Michael lightly touching the ground, eyes hard, expression grave.

He remembers two swords: one proud line of cold bright steel, once Lucifer’s own, and the other, a blazing flame, the seal of the First Archangel, God’s Loyal General blazing with incredible power.

He remembers their fight, a lethal dance.

He also remembers the wicked satisfaction as he had slain one of Michael’s wings; the meteor shower falling to Earth applying to re-enact the destruction of the Flood; Michael’s silent scream of agony.

And he also remembers how nothing could prevent his defeat.

“ _Oh, how thou art fallen Lucifer, Son of Morning._ ”

The Earth shuddered and creaked and cracked in the form of a bottomless hole behind him. Lucifer could feel the heat blast from the passage, yet it felt nothing compared to the sun glaring down at him unforgiving with accusation.

“ _Despite the time that so generously has been given to you, you still cling to your sins and refrain from repentance._ ”

Tears of wrath and sorrow choked him. No word, no helpless wicked scream could leave his throat. His eyes were searching for his big brother’s regal dear features but they were all hidden beneath the visor of his helmet.

The heavens split open and in a blinding stairway of light the entire Host and their Father himself sat judgement on Satan.

As Michael proceeded to carry out the verdict Lucifer came shy to glare at the unreachable God. _Why don’t you proclaim your award upon me yourself?! You betrayed me! All of you threw me away! Was I not enough?_ he screamed internally.

But then the divine words of banishment wove unbreakable chains around him. His wings were broken; his grace writhed under the weight and burn of the shackles.

“ _In the name of the Holy Father you are banished from His light, far away out into darkness to wait in your exile for eternities and eternities until your final judgement arrives.”_

Then came the fire, the unbearable cold, the final miles of his Fall down, down into the greatest depth of the universe, sealed away, freezing, the last flicker of his light dimmed, burnt, ruptured—

Lucifer crashes to the ground at the feet of the Golden Gate.

The world is spinning around him, devoid of straight lines, sharp contours; his head constantly wants to fall back to the fractured pavement. 

A whole body shiver tears through the angel, followed by a crushing wave of heat that could melt the icecaps on each end of the world.

Clenching his teeth, willing his sense of balance back in order Lucifer pushes himself up. He forces the memories away back into the darkness where they are never supposed to lurk and feed his never eternal roots of his hatred and thirst for revenge. What could prod such horrible memories to emerge so close to the surface…?

_Michael_. Michael and his accursed fire.

He flaps his wings, absolutely uncaring how many passers-by might be caught up in their broken chaos.

“Michael?” he calls out from the dark hallway, voice low, threatening.

There is no answer.

Irritated, Lucifer has to find his annoying brother crawling along the burning rope of their connection just to give him a piece of his mind about their damned connection, and how Michael will never have the ground to argue cheating and playing dirty when it comes to making the other suffer.

He is anything but prepared for the sight that greets him when he throws the bathroom’s door open.

Lucifer feels himself pale, the anger flowing down the drain. His head grows cold while his stomach churns hot, flushed with all the blood rushing from his face. He feels really sick. It’s only the sharp pain just behind his heart that nails him to the spot, somehow still standing.

Michael is in terrible pain.

Seeing him burning up from the inside, close to sobbing and gasping for air under the freezing stream of the shower to ease the pain just a little is breaking Lucifer's heart. Before he could think better of it he is pulled to his brother, wrapping him up in his arms, pulling him back to his chest.

He feels helpless like a child _._

The despair with which Michael unconsciously leans back into his touch, grasps for his naked forearms for his skin is cool, crunches the traitorous heart into fine diamond dust.

Lucifer hurriedly shreds his shirt for more skin-on-skin contact because he really wants to help – if for nothing else than the pain ringing through his skull.

  _It doesn’t matter._ It doesn’t matter, he repeats again and again, because how could it? Michael is delirious with fever, what will he remember?

Soon, though, the water pressure rather threatens to throw Michael off balance. His knuckles are white on the faucet while the other is ready to tear the skin off Lucifer’s wrist until he can claw at the bone below. With deliberate movements Lucifer tightens his arms around Michael and lowers themselves down into the bathtub. His breath drawing ice flowers behind Michael’s ear he holds his brother through the new flood of seizures, fights the impossible heat of his skin until the tub fills up around to their chests.

Maybe he should turn Michael around. Have him straddle his thighs so that they could be heart to heart, and Michael could absorb Lucifer’s cold easier. But _how_ , if the smallest shudder causes a whole new flood of mauling pain to rip through his brother’s body and grace?

Lucifer helplessly watches as suns blink out of existence and as death-glimmering golden smoke escape Michael in thick, billowing curls.

All he can do is softly caress the other’s shoulders and wait for the gagging to ease as the angel desperately tries to hold to his essence.

The hushing words he whispers are talons tearing at his lips, but slowly, in tiny droplets they dribble through the chaos of destructive creation that raves inside his brother.

“Hush, Michael, all is right,” he whispers, gentle and painful like the first time he had called for Heaven’s Firstborn through the scattered bits of galactic rubble. “Just let it go, brother. Hush… Let it go, it’s not your fire. It’s foreign, it’s not yours. Hush, and let it go.”

All he can provide is keeping up the new loads of ice cubes bubbling to the surface before Michael’s escaping grace brings it all to boil.

It takes long minutes, maybe even an hour for Michael to exhaust himself in his suffering.

Michael is light, boneless in his arms as Lucifer gathers all the warmth in his lungs to blow and dry the sheen of water clinging to Michael’s skin. The elder whimpers softly. Lucifer answers gently in kind. He knows. But the layer of ice he could freeze on the other’s body would do him more harm; it would melt in a second either way.

Only Lucifer’s heart is heavy as he lays his brother down in bed.

He is about to turn away when Michael weakly calls out, “Lucifer,” but the fingers curling around the Morning Star’s wrist are strong in their vice-like grip. “Lucifer, I’m sorry.”

“Shut up, Michael.” Lucifer retorts, his eyes glinting in the dark. “Go to sleep. It’s only the fever talking.”

“I’m sorry,” Michael says again, insistent.

“Okay, okay,” Lucifer huffs irritated. He tries to pry Michael’s fingers off his wrist, but to no avail. He would have to break them if he wants to leave. He can feel the hammering beats of his heart resonating through the lump in his throat. “You got me soaked up. No big deal.”

Then the irritation turns into confusion, as he _sees_ the expression on Michael’s face. Tears stream down his noble, so young and sorrow-ridden features.

 “Why do you make me do this?”

“I don’t make you do anything,” Lucifer answers carefully.

“You do,” Michael chokes out, only keeping it together that he isn’t sobbing out the words. “You can never be patient. Morning Star, you always want something more, and always now. Why couldn’t you lay low? Why do you make me lock you away?”

“It was your choice!” he snaps.

“If I serve Him, He’d give us time! He’d give _you_ time. You could live, please, brother, step down!”

Lucifer feels poison rising in his throat with a vicious hiss through his clenched teeth, but instead it freezes in ice chunks in his mouth at the terror of the memory.

Michael looks him in the eye. He is so sad. “You won’t forgive me,” he says, and now, now he is old again.

But Lucifer is, too, and his anger is nearly just as ancient as the universe. “You promised you’d never hurt me,” he tells Michael and his flesh turns to ice in the other’s scorching hold; he doesn’t even feel the skin blistering. “You promised you’d rather die than see me in pain.” The accusation is silent. _Where were your promises then?_

Michael’s hand falls back on the sheets, limp. His gaze turns at them, deep and dark with disgust as if they were covered in blood, and grime, and sin itself.

“Would you forgive me if I died for you?” he asks, not daring to look up.

Lucifer feels something still inside him. “Go to sleep, Michael,” he orders stiffly.

“ _When_ I die for you. Will you then forgive me?”

Lucifer presses two fingers to Michael’s forehead and watches as he falls back on the pillow. He is delirious with fever, Lucifer tells himself. Why should he try find some sense in his frantic words?

Yet, he cannot seem to stop the shaking. The windows tremble in their frame, scratches run along the glass with an awful screech, static rises in volume until people cry out in anguish streets away—That is when Lucifer cannot watch the tears still flowing down Michael’s face any longer.


	10. Had enough

 “Have you had enough?” Lucifer sneers at the sky. “Are you laughing in some damn pocket universe? You dirty little bastard, how dare you do this to him?!”

Now he knows what has been so strange, that prickling unease chilling his grace whenever he looked at Michael. The pillar of flame that overflows the vessel by miles – it is barely a campfire now. It is slowly blinking out sun after sun.

“What did Michael do?”

_No_. _What didn’t he do?_

“What else do you want from him?”

Lucifer is drunk off on anger. High winds tear at the mess that is in his head, but no matter what profanities he bellows at the parched belly of the heavens he cannot tune out the screams _Michael’s dying, Michael’s dying._

But on top of that – he is turning human first.

“Cage broken, no Apocalypse and now your soldier is playing house with me. So is he useless now? You’ve milked him for all he’s worth and that’s it?! Throw him away like a broken toy?”

If only Michael could see it that way too! If only he realized that they were simple pawns on a chessboard; even Michael who might have thought himself to be the Queen – everyone is expendable! Especially when God is playing just for the kicks and giggles.

“If you ever planned on coming back— This would be a damn good time!”

To mock his rage and powers, the world falls silent around him. Only Lucifer’s heaving breaths picking up shiver the night which soon turns crisp. The air freezes into clear crystals that crunch under his teeth when he clenches them so hard he could shatter bone.

“You had him first, but now he’s mine. Michael’s mine, you hear me?! You think you won over me? You think you don’t need him anymore?”

His manic laughter tears lightnings at ink-coloured sky.

“You should have loved him! You should have kept him better! But now he is mine! _He is mine_ , you hear me? And then. Then, when I love him, Heaven won’t help you! I will sit over your throne! I’ll be the one to laugh at your misery and hate you. I hate you more than I _ever_ did!

“ _Michael is mine!_ ”

Thunder claps and shakes the whole world speechless.

Lucifer stands panting, the wings of his shirt beating around him in the tempest his own rage has aroused.

Now that he added one and one together he feels numb – sucked empty. Sadly, even though it is highly unpleasant there is nothing he can do about it at the moment. The cold rain beats down on his face, dozens of little pins of scorching brimstone on his ever-thinning skin.

As he rubs a hand down his features his palm comes away painted copper-brown. Just blood and water. _Just_ blood and water.

When he returns smelling of fresh earth and ozone Lucifer finds Michael the exact way he had left him. He didn’t move an inch from his pillow.

Lucifer feels tempted to take his perch on the edge of the bed and smooth out the pained creases from his brother’s forehead. Kiss the deep furrow away as a physical, burning sign of his claim – renewed. No. _Exchanged_. Back in the day it was always Michael to kiss Lucifer on the forehead. Soft, lingering just a beat longer, overflowing with the brotherly affection that had been engrained in the substrate code of his grace.

If only for a second he could pretend to lift the weight of Heaven from Michael’s shoulders. Just to see him as young and serene as he still sometimes haunts Lucifer’s memories and had caused him the greatest suffering in his prison. Beautiful and magnificent, authority and duty.

Yet, somehow he relents.

Instead something else catches his attention. On the desk lays an open journal, thick with several bookmarks peeking out on all sides. The top pages are crumbled, even half-torn out.

Lucifer casts one glance at his brother, then edges closer and riffles through the pages.

They are filled from margin to margin with Michael’s pristine, clean-cut handwriting. A collection of prayers. In the drawer he finds at least a dozen of pens in different colours. As he skims through a few prayers a system seems to form. Of course Michael has to keep order in all his things.

Red is for the soldiers and authorities praying for Saint Michael to bring them back home to their loved ones. Blue is for the ceremonial recitations from the Sunday ministrations. Pale green is for “ _God, I hate this bitch so much…”_ Gold is for the Lord’s prayer, and this is where a crease starts to form over Lucifer’s brow, because there are more and more little notes in green and three different shades and thickness of blue and black ink, all of them addressed to _Our Heavenly Father_ or _Dear Lord in Heaven_  and so on and so forth.

The frown only deepens as in the late pages Michael’s handwriting gets messed up. The lines grow sinuous, the rounding of letters are scooped into the paper so that it’s only a breath away from tearing the page. The words, too, make less and less sense. As if someone tried to write them down from a foreign language they knew bits of but the syllables are off; misheard, misspelled.

The last three pages, though. They are a mess. Crossed out lines, spilled ink, wrinkled, crumpled. Lucifer smoothes the last one out. On the bottom in quivering capitals—

I CAN T

NO MORE please.

As he flees the room, second time that night, Lucifer doesn’t notice the new track of tears washing Michael’s cheeks.

 

                                                                

 

Next morning, surprisingly, as Lucifer rounds the corner into the kitchen he finds Michael hunched over the table. However, the moment he takes a better look at the sharp line of his profile in the pale light Lucifer falters in his swift, confident steps. Michael is pale, painfully so, his once golden skin is as dry as parchment, his eyes are hollow and surrounded by dark purple circles and deep shadows.

_Why does it hit him so hard when he remembers with painful accuracy what happened last night?_

Michael nurses a mug filled with some foul, steaming liquid.

“You look like a _man_ after a week of sleep deprivation,” Lucifer says, and walks around the table, elegant and glowing.

A low, hollow laugh scrapes at the back of Michael’s throat and it is enough to mask up his wince at Lucifer’s entrance. Or at least enough that the Morning Star lets it slip.

Michael takes a tentative sip of his brew.

The struggle is obvious in the fine twitch of his features, the drawing of his brows, the set of his jaw and the bob of his Adam’s apple as he dry-swallows next to keep that few drops of liquid down.

“I have never slept from the beginning of time,” Michael says with empty mirth in his voice. “It’s truly awful when it catches up on you.”

Lucifer regards him with a long look that Michael returns almost warily. Distrustfully.

“Why do you let this happen to you?”

Michael’s gaze slips to a point in front of Lucifer on the table top. It stays there for a long time before green meets blue again.

“Everything has a reason. And everything leads to something good. Ultimately.”

“Don’t try to feed me this fairy tale. You don’t believe it either.”

“I sure do.”

“Leave it. You’re such an awful liar.”

A scoff chokes Michael for a second. “Two thousand years and no one questioned where God was. I think that makes me a decent liar, Lucifer.”

_Lying to brainless soldiers isn’t that hard._

“Still, Michael, you practically allow your own murder. Why don’t you search for a cure?”

“Every crime’s cure is repentance. You know best how it works when you don’t want to give up your sin, don’t you?”

Lucifer narrows his eyes.

“So, for what kind of crime do you rather take this punishment?”

Michael's lips quirk into a dead smirk, and says, “There are too many and too deep to list. We are all fallen, brother.”

After that an uncomfortable silence falls over them. Michael turns all his attention back to his morning brew, almost ashamed, and definitely a bit put out. As if he couldn’t believe what he just said – as if another person had spoken using his own mouth. Meanwhile Lucifer is trying to make sense of the warm prickling behind his eyes, and the cold burning acid in his stomach.

This silence had to be broken or so goodness help him he would snap.

“Have you eaten yet?” he asks, voice carefully impassionate.

“You can drop the act, Lucifer,” Michael sighs. He unwraps his hands from around the cup and with grace, absolutely unexpected from someone who should be best described as dead on his feet, he stands, and in three smooth strides rounds the table. “I’m grateful you have calmed before your return.”

Cool, clammy hands cup either side of his face, but Lucifer riles back brief of the brush of purple lips to the top of his forehead.

For a fleeting second the heartbreak is palpable in the depth of Michael’s gleaming eyes. Then it flickers out, like a candle put out and only the dead of the night remains there.

“I’ve stopped being Like-God a good while ago. Maybe that’s a new low even in your eyes.”

Lucifer only glares at him, hard and relentless as Michael turns to leave. A shadow at dusk, barely more.

 

It takes a long time for his shock to lift, and his gaze flutters again.

Michael’s temperature has never dropped below the heat of roaring fire. And yet, now his touch was just like any other on Lucifer’s skin.


	11. Brother’s keeper

 

That night and the following morning broke something in Lucifer.

Maybe it is for the best. Now at least he has one terrifyingly deep void at his disposal where he can shove all his issues, slam heavy doors on them, and then hope that all that hatred laced with icy fear won’t crawl out like the terrific monsters of old times. Monsters that even archangels aren’t always able to slay. Monsters hungry for more, always more, until there is nothing but themselves to devour.

Lucifer dreads to become something like that. He is a monster, true, even though this admission sounds way too easy to be truly honest, when he claims Michael as his ( _so passionate and selfish on his right of possession_ ) he only demands what was rightfully given to him. Lucifer is the only one to own Michael’s love, devotion, loyalty, _his everything_.

It is part of the Morning Star’s domain. This is just how God had intended it. ( _This is your brother._ ) If the old man didn’t think Lucifer would let _Him_ steal something his? Well. There is no blame befalling Lucifer.

 

Initially he gives Michael more space.

He comes and goes in some pattern that Lucifer doesn’t care to keep track of, because that would be too obsessive for someone who hates his brother like no one else, but it allows him a sense of fleeting false security. Michael is holding up. Michael is all right.

It gives the excuse for Lucifer to watch with barely restrained glee when his brother emerges amidst a thick cloud of black smoke, coughing and cursing, while waiting for the firemen to arrive. They quickly grow acquainted with Heaven’s ex-Prince, and certainly contemplate giving him a crash course on how to deal with household appliances, because it must be tiring putting out the fires two times a week.

(It is due to the realization that raw meat, or just the opposite, black coal, isn’t really good for his health. Such dishes only make the headaches worse and on top of all makes him dizzy and sick all day. Lucifer feels sorry for him. He really does. They are such human traits, and that is enough reason for pity.)

Either way, Michael slowly but surely gains confidence in the kitchen. There are less fires and menacing smoke, and even if there is, Michael now simply puts them out himself or just opens the window and grumbles under his breath for a while.

Lucifer secretly watches what kind of food Michael shops for and what he tries to cook, because it is fascinating ( _adorable_ ) how he tries to follow the instructions of the recipe with that frown over his brows he used to have while training fledglings. Yet, his heart is breaking even more when Michael's grace shrinks to a ball of red-gold star in the middle of his chest, no bigger than the size of his palm, casting some warm but dying light on his features.

After about a week or two, Michael kindly informs him that he is welcome to join for dinner.

He has no idea why, but Lucifer complies.

It is awkward and uncomfortable silence, and Lucifer barely recognizes the texture of some stew Michael didn’t burn.

“So… how is it?” Michael ventures, voice carefully flat.

Lucifer almost chokes on some carrot – maybe? – He is taken by surprise at the inquiry. But even more so by the panic rising in the pit of his stomach that he actually has no idea. His eyes flicker up to Michael’s serene face at the other end of the table – to his frustration ( _relief_ ) his brother is smiling kindly.

“You don’t feel a thing, do you?”

At his placating tone Lucifer shakes off the spell of long-lost innocence; he simply glares back nibbling on his spoon. That hard texture is at least something he is familiar with. When Michael offers that he doesn’t have to finish eating Lucifer peevishly sets his jaw and keeps on scooping the molecule tasting stew in his mouth.

About a week later, when he opens the fridge in search for the last drops of his demon blood stash he finds that there are pots filled with, well, the next wave of evolution if he wants to be honest. Michael still often forgets that food expires, and only puts the result of his alchemy lessons a few days late into the fridge. It doesn’t make his meals look any more appealing.

Lucifer waits a few days to inform his brother that by the time fluffy grey blobs start to float in his soup it certainly isn’t edible anymore.

Michael still treats his hunger with distrust. More often than not Lucifer catches him frowning at the pain in his churning stomach as the elder is still a prisoner of a warrior’s mindset – _he wouldn’t cater to pain_. Then Lucifer stomps down his worry, snarls at the way the jagged edges of glass slice him open. Michael is fighting his burning grace. He is denying it. That is good. That is how it should be.

They also start spending some time together, watching TV, both of them frustrated on different kind of shows. Michael watches cooking shows with an interested headtilt, concentration written all over his face as he tries to covet all the tiny details of the recipe to memory. Also horror. He is so indifferent to the amount of tomato sauce sprayed all over the setting it is almost entertaining joining him in ridiculing the cheesy movies and guess who the serial killer with the chainsaw will slay next. On the other hand Michael gets flustered on the documentaries humans never seem bored of about how Earth would look like after the Apocalypse. Seeing the naked bafflement on his face and listen to him slowly slipping into Enochian as he murmurs his not too high opinion on the so called _scholars_ Lucifer feels a sense of fulfilled retribution for all the stupid soap operas he can only last for eight minutes.

But Lucifer still feels frustrated. He cannot always deal with the shadows growing darker around the edges of his vision where Michael no longer extends his fiery glow. When it becomes unbearable he leaves. Whether for fleeting hours or whole days the time passed still weighs heavy on his heart. It makes the two of them living together all the more troublesome.

Those times on his return he often carries the scent of lurking aggression under the veil of ozone and desperation. Those times Michael doesn’t search for his gaze. When Lucifer just plops down next to him on the couch a breath too close Michael flinches a bit but doesn’t send him away. Never send him away. That is all he can get. And it is as good as it would ever be.

 

 

Pain flashes through Lucifer like lightning cuts the night in half. It is blinding, stunning.

When the ringing stops in his ears, and finally his head doesn’t want to split apart he finds himself lying on the cool, black dirt of his garden. Dozens of roses are crushed under his body, and the sun seems to have moved along his arc towards the edge of horizon. The poison green leaves had taken a brownish shade in the blood orange hue.

There is still a dull ache thrumming at the back of his skull. Like war drums from the depth of a mountain.

_Michael_ – is his first thought.

What else could hurt him more than his hatefully beloved brother?

“Michael…?” Lucifer tries to reach out.

He hasn’t had a chance to use the link among angels nearly since—for a long time, true, but with Michael they can hear each other. Or they _could_ if dragging himself closer and closer to Michael didn’t feel like climbing a rope up the stream in a blizzard.

The pain threatens to blind him again, and Lucifer falls back on the ground, hands delving into the soft dirt.

There is no chance to find Michael like this…

 

Lately it has also been Michael to push Lucifer out of his head, keeping himself obscure.

It made Lucifer vivid with anger. So, by the moment Michael closes the front door behind him, returning from yet another one of his mysterious outings Lucifer pounces his brother slamming him up against the wall right next to the entrance—

Only to stammer back the next second when he takes a better look at the state Michael is in.

Lucifer’s fingers loosen in the front of the other’s jacket; shivering, one hand settles on Michael’s hip – as if Lucifer wasn’t holding him up with the whole length of his body pressed against his – and the other reaches up to stop a breath away from the purple bruise on Michael’s jaw. His lip is split; half of his face is swollen, a huge bruise spreading.

Clothes torn, dirty and bloody—

“What on earth has happened to you?”

“I believe the appropriate term is,” Michael rasps, “I got mugged.”

“How…? Why?! How could you _possibly_ get mugged?! You _are_ an _arch_ angel! You should wade in the mortals’ blood, chop their heads off, burn them to ashes and you—you get mugged?!”

Lucifer pushes himself away from Michael as if he was contagious with a disgusting disease.

“You don’t fight back? This is how you want to show you’re sorry for you tried to annihilate half of the population?!”

Michael flinches at the lash of Lucifer’s voice. That puts him off balance, and unceremoniously, with a pained hiss he crumbles to the floor.

“They don’t deserve it!” Lucifer snaps; he is too outraged to give in to the urge to take Michael in his arms and lift him up again. “Don’t sink lower than _them_!”

“Yes, go on! Blame me for everything!” Michael gives back, but the edge of his voice is taken away as he still tries to catch his breath.

“How else could such abortions lay a hand on you if it wasn’t for some stupid martyrdom of yours?!”

“… I had a seizure, okay?” Michael averts his eyes to the ground, ashamed of his weakness. “Not that you should know.”

The world spins out from right under Lucifer’s feet.

He falls to his knees, cradles Michael’s bruised face in his hands; Michael hisses and jerks in pain but still leans into the cold touch. Lucifer’s heart jumps painfully in his chest.

“Let me heal you,” he begs. “Let me heal you, brother!”

“Can’t stand when it’s not you inflicting my pain?” Michael murmurs sardonically.

It takes Lucifer great effort not to crush Michael’s jaw in his helpless fury.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Lucifer pleads softly, his grace sparkling white on his fingertips. “But I still might.”

“I can’t, Lucifer,” Michael answers; there is no fear in his expression only barely concealed disappointment in himself. “I don’t control it.”

Lucifer’s cry jags at the sky like a thousand knives.

Icy wind howls among the galaxies swarming in the chaos on his wings as he stretches them, ready to take off. The dam has broken, someone is going to pay. If he has to he will annihilate everyone in Detroit, and then everyone in Michigan, then—

“Lucifer!” Michael tries to reach out for him, to grab his hand, to try and soothe him, but the lightning dancing in the blue eyes pin him in his place.

Michael’s cry of “ _Lucifer!_ ” accompanies him on the warpath.

 

When Lucifer returns, he finally feels soothed. No, not calm just yet, more like a moment of satisfaction as red blood drips onto the carpet from his fingertips.

In his content mood he looks over his brother. Michael is taking up the whole length of the sofa. His dirty jacket is haphazardly draped over his shoulders; a package of frozen green peas is lying in a luke-warm puddle on the floor with Michael’s hand slung over the edge brushing the ground.

With an evil smile Lucifer edges up close and tweaks Michael’s toe. He barely just swallows back the laughter bubbling in his chest when Michael curls in on himself as a mimosa does at the gentlest touch.

Eventually, though, a choking sound escapes Lucifer. Strange, how quickly a pretty sight can turn sour and cold. It feels so unnatural to see Michael recoil in fear from another assault of pain. An animalistic base instinct the Sword of Heaven has never shown before.

“If you go on like this you’ll sleep through the rest of your life,” Lucifer remarks dryly.

Michael blinks up at him with bleary eyes. He frowns. Lucifer wonders if he sees one of his nightmares standing at the foot of his makeshift bed. A monster of a brother drenched in red.

“Not that I have that long,” Michael murmurs with a yawn that quickly turns into a hiss when it pulls on sore muscles. His eyes flicker to the TV. It is some kind of documentary on engineering playing, Lucifer notes.

“Nothing better to watch?” he grimaces.

Michael doesn’t even cut him a glare as he pushes the jacket off for the fabric to pool around his middle, and starts fishing for the remote.

“It was Hell’s Kitchen before I fell asleep.” As he finds the controller with twinkling eyes he starts switching channels.

Lucifer rolls his eyes. “You’re turning into a human housewife.”

When he moves to sit down Michael suddenly throws his legs out to take up the whole space.

“Don’t you dare muck up the couch!”

“A snivelling housewife,” Lucifer says with sweet malice, and sits down anyway. When Michael pulls back so that his brother wouldn’t sit on his legs he isn’t quick enough, what with being all sleep-mussed, and Lucifer grabs both of his ankles to replace them on his lap. The elder watches in disgust as Lucifer’s fingers smear bloody lines from his toes to the cuff of his jeans.

“Leave me alone or I’ll kick you in the face,” Michael warns.

Lucifer only tightens his hold and winks.

Michael’s glare could roast half the planet in a second.

In retaliation he halts on some awful crime drama series, and grins devilishly when Lucifer snaps in fifteen minutes and starts complaining about the humans’ stupidity, and how a proper murder should be carried out.

 

Michael would never ever admit it, and Lucifer won’t bring it up either, but last night the elder fell asleep under the soothing circles his little brother drew on his feet, and eventually had to be carried up into his room.

Funny enough, Michael is growing heavier the more grace he loses. One would think that since angels could turn into an immovable force that would perfectly match one of the humans’ greatest paradoxes, with their shrinking level of essence they would become more human. Weight, habits, emotions and all. Yet, instead of growing lighter – what is a man’s weight for an angel? – Michael is growing heavier by the day.

Or maybe it is just Lucifer.

The burntmarks are the hardest to bear. They are searing even through layers of clothes, Lucifer can feel the scorched feathers inking themselves into his forearm and chest. The knowledge that he cannot heal them, that there is _nothing_ to be healed is maddening.

Lucifer dearly misses the sight of Michael's wings. He used to have strong and beautiful nightly coloured wings. Michael was never proud of them the same way Lucifer is of his own glorious and impressive ones of pure white light even with the violent cracks of malice in them. He appreciated the purpose in them, the power he needed to be fast and effective in battle; the talons, another pair of weapons for the fight. They spanned wide in their fiery glow to instil fear and adoration in his subordinates. Power, darkness and fire, a magnificent sight for everyone to see who he was. Michael was grateful however he was created. And he takes losing them as if it had been part of his creation all _along_.

Lucifer misses them so much.

And so it remains a constant reminder of their curse.  

Why would Michael let all this happen to him? Lucifer only doesn’t ask point-blank because the tears and the fury blazing in their wake choke him. He shakes his head, sets his jaw and reminds himself that Michael is his. Whether he likes it or not, Michael is his, and Lucifer will find a way to stop this. He will.

 

Next morning Michael pads down into the kitchen with a bewildered expression. His features are still too sleepy to display the wonder and suspicion at the same time. In the doorway whatever word he wanted to say stills on his lips, bleary eyes rounding. Then he stifles a yawn.

“I’m sure I’ve never seen the kitchen in better shape,” he says and walks over to the table and waves at the chair opposite of Lucifer’s. “Is that mine?”

Lucifer scoffs as if to say _who else?_ “Only because it’s hard to see through all the smoke that comes with your cooking.”

Michael doesn’t take the bait. Instead he looks at the plate in front of him. He only doesn’t turn it around to sniff at it suspiciously because his hands are securely tucked under his thighs.

“Don’t be so distrustful,” Lucifer grumbles. “You couldn’t be poisoned just yet either way.”

The look he receives is totally worth all his troubles. Lucifer is a master at acting nonchalant, mouth pressed into a petulant firm line, arms crossed over his chest, but he cannot really help that little spring of doubt dribbling like a silver line that he might have done something wrong. It is childish, ancient and long forgotten in those times when he had no one to care for. He tries to wave it away.

Honestly, as far as he can tell, the omelette doesn’t look half bad. He might have put a bit more salt into it than the recipe said, but otherwise? He didn’t even burn the bacon (unlike certain brothers who tend to burn even water) and orange juice hasn’t killed anyone as far as he knows. (He didn’t trust himself with the coffee machine. Correction, he didn’t think he would be patient enough to find out which button blows the whole thing up.)

When Michael starts to eat Lucifer watches him with ever-growing trepidation.

 “How did you do this?” Michael asks after a few bites.

“It’s not witchcraft, you know.”

“That might be a problem.”

Lucifer’s brow twitches then arches in a bewildered fashion. “Is it that bad?”

“No! No.” Michael quickly reassures him with a faint smile. He picks up a strip of bacon and nibbles on the corner, the smile warming on his face. “It actually tastes pretty good.”

“But…?”

Bacon still hanging from his mouth Michael stands and makes his way for the coffee machine, picks a mug from the drying rack and pushes a few buttons.

“But when the recipe says two eggs it doesn’t mean it as whole eggs.”

“Just thought you could use some calcium.”

Michael’s hand on his shoulder and the smile behind his back is warm. It makes hiding his own tiny smile all that much harder.

When Michael is back with a steaming mug of coffee in his hand, to Lucifer’s greatest surprise he proceeds to finish his breakfast. Well, he isn’t going to offer the same way out, but still. Michael has always been balancing on the edge of brave and idiotic.

“And what are you doing when you’re not—You know…”

“Vomiting up my grace?” Michael helps him out, using a tone on which he would ask if all the fledglings were in their quarters, quiet for the night.

“Yeah.” Lucifer nods, slightly uncomfortable. He tries to be tactful once and it comes out awkward. Fantastic.

“It might sound strange to you, but I’m working. Well. Volunteering to be exact. It’s not like I have much working experience they would accept. Governor of Heaven and Prince of the Host wouldn’t sit well with them, would it?”

“You know how to be human?”

Michael cocks an amused eyebrow at him as if saying _Duh_.

“I’ve been watching them since the day they were born.” He takes a sip from his coffee. The taste is still bitter on his tongue, and truly doesn’t understand how humans could get addicted to it, but he also _understands_ – it’s all written in the miniscule jerk of that quirked brow. “I watched how you try to push them to their ultimate demise, and how they still manage to dance away from the End.”

“You almost make it sound fascinating.”

“They indeed are.” Lucifer rarely has ever seen Michael’s eyes glint like that. “Take their technology for example—“

“Oh no!”

“You must admit, it’s captivating, where they are now, what they have reached is exceptional.”

“No,” Lucifer raises his hands, showing his palms, “I’m not going to talk with you about how this rotten race thinks of itself as the new god of the world.”

“But—“

“Especially that you are programmed to think high of them.”

“I’m not. I’m not some brainless soldier,” Michael pouts. There is no better way to describe this frown and pinched lip combination.

Lucifer reaches out over the table and gently pats Michael on the cheek.

“Yes, you are.”

That morning is probably the nicest and calmest they have spent in each other’s company.


	12. Sea

There are nights when Michael’s sleep is restless; he dreams of torture foreign of Lucifer’s hands. It is an awful sickness of the mind, _memory_ , something that Lucifer cannot erase while Michael is in possession of his grace. It just pushes back, writhes in his desperate grasp and causes his big brother even more pain.

Abruptly snapping him out of his horrors does no more good either.

Those nights Lucifer spends in his garden where the breeze ruffles his hair and hisses through the fractures of his wings. He cannot take the restraint of the four walls. Not when he feels so helpless.

At some point Michael would stumble out of the house, soil cool under his bare feet, blind and drunk on nightmares, wobbling in his steps but never enough to topple over. Lucifer pretends not to notice him. At painstaking cost, but he would turn his back as Michael finally settles at the root of some rose bush, tucking his thighs against his chest and watch with sightless eyes as his toes kneed the soft black earth.

In the slow drawl of Enochian he would start reciting his name, his orders that stand no more for a long, long while, and also those that will last far into the End of Time, until his green eyes finally gain some pale light. By the time Michael can state for certain that it was just a bad dream Lucifer would already have moonlight oozing from the wound on his lower lip. As Michael stays, trembling through the aftershock and realization of what he has just locked away in his own personal hell, Lucifer carefully, not to scare him, lowers himself onto one knee in front of his dying sun.

“ _Micha_ ,” he asks softly, touching the side of the other’s face to get his attention. Despite all his care Michael’s gaze still flutters startled. “You are here with me.”

Michael is about to nod, dream-drunk and sucked empty, but then his big brother instincts kick back in. He reaches a shivering hand to shyly touch the corner of Lucifer’s mouth.

“You’re hurt,” he whispers, faint, but with righteous anger boiling deep under the cracked, dusty crystal floor.

“It’s okay.”

Michael only shakes his head, eyes steeling. His hand cups the back of Lucifer’s head and pulls him down so that he can kiss his little brother all right.

 


	13. Freeze the flames

Lucifer doesn’t realize what he has been doing until he feels the couch shift to his right.

When he opens his eyes, only a narrow slit to make sure the warmth is real and not just his starved and embittered imagination, he finds Michael sitting there one leg folded and arm lining the backrest so that he can face Lucifer. Even despite the easy, nearly sluggish posture he still sits like the prince he soon ceases to be. His hair is mussed, Lucifer must have just roused him from bed, wearing long-sleeves to cover up the burnt marks but his meagre clothing cannot make him any less royal. Michael carries his authority in that turning and fiercely burning globe beneath the cover of the white star in the middle of his chest. Even though it’s no bigger than the size of Lucifer’s fist – _how easily he could punch through the fence of ribs, crash the star and paint it red; he could grasp that ancient globe and crunch it in his palm, he could feel as it bleeds out down his fingers and forearm_ –

It is fire, purest and deadliest of all still containing the raw power from the beginning of creation.

“What do you want?” Lucifer mumbles. His tongue feels heavy and dry in his mouth as his eyes rake over Michael; the grace of his painfully straight spine, the firm line of his mouth and the shadows under his piercing eyes.

Michael looks at him for a long while without blinking – Lucifer feels warmth and cold chasing each other as they prickle along the length of his body, curling his toes with a pixilated tickle and making the fine hairs stand at the back of his neck. The realization washes over him that this is the most angel-like Michael has been acting in the past month.

Blinking. In a sense it is funny how used he got to those abominably human manners. In another, though, it is truly terrifying.

Finally Michael tilts his head to the side slightly. His eyes has lost the sharpness of a hawk as he asks, “Could you repeat it? Now that I’m here?”

Lucifer stares back at him with narrowed eyes.

Michael blinks long.

“I only heard your voice,” he admits. “I can no longer make out the words of prayers. And… It’s been a long time since you last called for me like this.”

Lucifer might smile sharp and evil, pumping poison into his teeth behind his lips ready to bite for such sentimentality, but not when there is a hard ball in his throat. Now the soft, barely recognizable glint of curiosity is understandable if not endearing.

He turns his head away fixing his gaze on the ceiling. For a long moment he contemplates his chances, whether it is wise to burn up such bridges, but then he remembers that even though above all he is prideful and hates being judged, he is jealous and greedy and he _desires_. So he lets his eyes slide shut and on a low voice he starts to recite one of the prayers he twisted around in his mind just a few minutes ago.

 

“Oh most noble Prince of the Angelic Hierarchies, _terror of the rebellious angels, my beloved Archangel Saint Michael,_ ” he doesn’t even have to squint his eyes open Lucifer feels the air growing tense.

“ _Lucifer.”_

_How he has changed his mind so quickly…_

Michael doesn’t only call out his name – it is his voice. His _true_ voice yet without the devastating power that once made even Lucifer bow to the ground. It’s gentle. Begging. It is a prayer of his own for Lucifer to quit it, to leave it, and not tear at the scars that already bleed on end.

He can imagine as the frown draws and deepens over Michael’s brows. But he has to go on.

Lucifer runs his tongue over his dry lips before he continues. He cannot stop now. That would be… fatal.

“…I, today offer and consecrate myself to you, and place myself, and… all I possess under your most powerful protection _._ ”

Michael doesn’t try to interrupt him again in the short pause Lucifer leaves to take a breath, to force air down into his lungs that feel too constricted and small – he could gasp like the fish thrown on land and he would live just as long on it. No, but Lucifer can feel his eyes on him. They might grow clouded, they might lose sight of the celestial plane but they pierce through Lucifer’s vessel. His grace shudders.

 _“_ I entreat you not to look at how little, I, as your servant have to offer, being only a wretched sinner, and so prone to _pride_ ,” his voice hitches on the last word, and he needs another fleeting moment to gather himself, “but to gaze, rather, with favourable eye at the heartfelt affection with which this offering is made.”

Shaking but warm, Michael’s hand is in his hair threading through the mess of silver-blond hair. Lucifer’s chest grows heavy. It feels so good, so heartbreakingly perfect he is about to regret he has ever wanted to feel, to think of his own.

“Come then, oh Glorious Prince, and succour me in my last struggle, in _temptation_ and – difficulties…”

There is no way he could go on or even close the prayer properly. So many things he wants to say and so much more that his voice would not carry.

He made the offering, shuddering but not in honesty.

Now he is waiting whether Michael will claim it or not.

The sensation of Michael’s fingers on his scalp, his blunt nails pressing into the skin just firm enough to catch his attention, guides him back from the brink of the abyss.

                                                              

The _Amen_ is a soft sigh of the wind among the trees that caresses his cheek but drifts away immediately, unnoticed and unmarked. Lucifer gives in and when Michael tugs him, just as firm and gentle, he goes obediently, too exhausted by voicing his sacrifice.

Michael presses a kiss in the mess of his hair.

After Lucifer only shivers ever so slightly but doesn’t push him away the kisses go on. To the younger’s forehead, along his hairline where the skin used to peel off now he is marked by little fire-coloured roses that bloom with some strangely unfamiliar warmth. There is a long, lingering kiss on his temple. Michael’s sigh is scorching and refreshing at the same time and his hand is strong as he guides Lucifer’s head away from its hard pillow on Michael’s collarbone.

Michael is feverish, again. He is pale with dawn dusting his cheeks and his eyes glint even in the incandescence of the stars beneath Lucifer’s skin, but when he leans in to press his mouth to Lucifer’s he is the ethereal force of war enchained in a human shape.

At first their kiss is gentle. Like already departing from a dream you don’t want to leave and you have to tread carefully lest you jolt awake.

After the initial tentative yet purposeful touch Michael's grace bursts. Fire lights up in his veins making his whole form glow with gold-red blood, and Lucifer just wraps one hand around Michael's hip, bruising so strong, to keep him close, tugging him into his lap to soak up all his warmth. He finally tastes fire that brings life and doesn't reek of sulphur and death, and his other hand is winded in Michael's hair until Michael bites down real hard on his lower lip because he has to _breathe_!

Michael gasps, but his blown and darkened eyes remain on Lucifer, like an eagle’s on its prey, watching the small drop of blood swell and trickle down – a thin red line on the endless plane of light.

When through the bleeding little scar Lucifer's grace surges to the surface, Michael's breath hitches in his throat.

His mouth is back immediately. 

This kiss, like so many others they have shared, is healing.

Healing Lucifer while Michael refuses to be healed.

And then it all flows through Lucifer. It brushes with Lucifer's blinding silver light and it's heady and electrocuting as the claim washes over him. He is accepted, he is desired in the purest and most passionately violent form, and it makes his entire being sing. His grace surges and pools in ecstasy, swarms like a lightningstorm under the thin layer of his skin to feel Michael's under his own, so close to touch seeking more contact so hungry for the old comfort until they can sink into each other....

Lucifer’s hands roam over Michael’s torso, chaotic and hungry for touch. He growls, and his hips buck up involuntarily when he feels again like putting his hands in flames. Pulling, uncaring if his fingers catch on smooth skin or the rough patch of the burnt marks, he pulls, grasps and sinks his fingers into the other’s flesh until they are so close their heaving chests don’t have the slightest room to expand.

Michael groans into his mouth – annoyed that their vessels are so confining, that matter dares to separate them. The sound quickly turns into a withering moan when Lucifer’s arm finds its way to curl around his waist and pulls him down flush in his lap.

Warm hands are shaking, their movements jerky and a little helpless. They don’t know where to hold, what to grasp, they rush in their touch, desperate to reach everything but too confused as to which star to burst among the fingers first.

Lucifer swallows an annoyed little whimper, and he can’t help but his lips draw to a grin.

Michael pulls back and glares, colour high in his cheeks, but oh, he is a sight to behold. Lips red and swollen from the kisses and even as he bares his teeth he is a new burst of flame that Lucifer cannot help but be drawn to. Like moth to the fire, like snakes to the warm touch of the sun.

_He either wants to melt, touching the surface of the sun and try to dig down into its core, or wants to be the one to freeze that light in his embrace._

Before Michael could act on his own pride, Lucifer wraps his arms around him and stands as if his brother weighed nothing. Bathing in the stream of Michael’s surprise, and the flash of arousal that he has no chance to deny at this point, Lucifer spreads his wings, and with one flap of the frozen feathers they are up in his bedroom.

As he is about to fold his wings away, ready to dive back for Michael’s lips, he is stopped.

Michael is still very close to him, his warmth thrumming and heating the air until it’s just bearable to breathe in. One hand lays gently on the side of Lucifer’s face, while the other tentatively reaches over his shoulder. The Morning Star shivers when a finger runs along the jagged edge of the base of one wing.

Michael presses his forehead to Lucifer’s.

“Spread them for me,” he murmurs against Lucifer’s lips.

With narrowed eyes Lucifer hesitates for a second, but eventually he relents.

Desperately keeping his prideful act together he angles his wings carefully. They span from one corner of the room to the other, the feathers unfurl slowly and gracefully. In truth, they hurt. It is painful to spread the flight feathers, chaos screeches and space howls among the threads, broken shreds of glass and ice creek as they slip against each other. Stardust filters to the carpet at their feet.

Michael’s eyes are lit up, bright, mesmerized, _awed_.

He shouldn’t look at the broken burnt wings like that! As if nothing had happened, as if Lucifer hadn’t fallen, as if hellfire hadn’t burnt and frozen his starlight beautiful wings!

Something dark curls with the pleasure of the past minutes.  Lucifer’s eyes are ablaze.

In one fatal blast his fallen grace envelops the room.

His wings flutter, sharp edges graze around, tearing at the walls and crushing the finely crafted furniture. One is splattered with warmth, thick and metallic short after they were caught in something solid and soft, like—

Any kind of broken and tainted wing is better than nothing at all. Michael probably only felt envious. Lucifer had fallen and he still got to keep his wings while he had made only one mistake and the only reminder he has are them burnt on his back.

But as he watches, the blood flowing down Michael’s thigh in vivid red rivulets seared into his mind, the elder’s gaze remains soft, overflowing with love, maybe hurt and guilt in the depth, but nothing dark. Nothing of envy or jealousy.

When their eyes meet again Michael smiles. So gentle, only a shadow, a thought, then he presses the whole length of his body against Lucifer’s hard one with a slight wince as he has to lean up for a tender kiss.

His lips slide easily, as if on ice, and slowly he deepens the kiss as he licks away all the anger, the confusion, until Lucifer embraces him again. Strong arms wrap around Michael’s back, taking off some of the strain from his injured leg.

“Do you think I could heal them?” Michael asks pulling back.

With a scoff Lucifer covers up the shiver that runs through him as Michael cuts his fingers open at the base of his wings.

“Don’t ruin the mood with your sentimentality.”

“ _Sentimentality_?” Michael echoes. He smears blood all over Lucifer’s T-shirt as he peels the fabric off one shoulder. “That’s new. You usually call me cold-blooded. A tool. A sword.”

“Heartless and brainless, yes,” Lucifer shrugs out of his upper layers before he tangles his fingers up in Michael’s shirt. “You are awful when you try on feelings.”

The grey-green eyes light up with gold. Michael tilts his hips just a bit to rub his erection to Lucifer’s own straining cock.

“How do I play at desire, then?” he rumbles.

“Not so bad.”

As it quickly became proven Michael’s concentration is not that easily broken. Even Lucifer’s praised and talented silver tongue couldn’t draw patterns on his neck that distracted the elder too long to get both of them out of their clothes without trouble.

Wind rattles the windows and howls among the leaves. It brings rainclouds from across the land to gather and clash over Detroit as the two archangels fall in bed, limbs entangled, chests hot and cold pressed together, hearts hammering so much louder than the thunder that rolls outside.

Sparks fly and thin lightnings crack where skin touches skin Lucifer melts and Michael cools. Every bruise, each drop of blood is another split on their vessels, new chance for their graces to try and burst the matter at the seams.

It is heady, the pleasure of the flesh, a faint reminder of Eden they cannot return to.

Lucifer moans.

He has to fight that his eyes do not flutter closed as Michael takes one of Lucifer’s hand in his, gaze burning trained on the Light Bringer’s face. He licks his reddened lips, breath fans moist and warm on the sensitive skin of his wrist. Then the tip of that hot tongue grazes the blue veins. They lit up silver-white in his trail. As if Michael’s touch could wake the slumbering grace.

                                                               

“ _Michael!_ ” Lucifer gasps.

The elder only flashes him a look, dark with desire, and latches his bleeding lips to the inside of Lucifer’s wrist.

Meanwhile his other hand is steady and slow as he strokes Lucifer’s throbbing cock. No squirming, no growls and moans can get him speed up until he sucked a bruise into the snow-white skin, starlight mingling on his breath and glowing dust mixed into the blood still seeping down his chin.

Lucifer is ready to lose his cool by then.

He is only a thin layer away from combusting, his grace, all the force of an avalanche, strains at his confines. Hunger tightens its grip around him and he wants more, more, _more_!

He locks his arms and legs around Michael and flips their positions so now he straddles his brother’s hips. The new angle, the friction he now controls is delicious.

Bathing in gold and red that pierces through his shadow even when the lightning outside strikes and white light floods the room, Lucifer leans down for one more deep kiss before with one swift move he sinks down.

It hurts at first, because _damn_ , these human bodies are needy and are _so_ sensitive, but almost immediately, as with all other bruises he had caused, Michael’s grace sweeps through flesh and skin, and it is beautiful, it is glorious, it’s Heaven and Hell crashing into each other—

Lucifer throws back his head in a silent scream.

Michael’s fingers dig deep, through strong muscles of his thighs. The blood dribbling from the wounds is silver white.

They both try to keep still, afraid of new friction but still hungry for the taste of each other. Too close, too soon, too much.

Michael is shaking, trapped under Lucifer. He is laid out, naked and raw in desire. He soon finds Lucifer is kind. Lucifer is generous. When his needs coincide with Michael’s.

Lucifer starts moving slowly, eyes on Michael all along.

For him it is less about the pleasure of the flesh, even though he can still feel the chill resonating in his grace, slowly building up into massive waves, but for Michael, who is hourly fusing with his vessel this is an exhilarating, overflowing experience. He is trembling as Lucifer grows more confident in the roll of his hips. Gasps linger on his blood-tainted lips, half lidded eyes lit up. Sometimes his body jerks and Michael barely stifles a moan.

The bed is steadily rocking against the wall; Michael writhes, and tries and fails to gain enough leverage to force Lucifer’s movements to change more in sync with his imperious needs. Lucifer only grins.

“Patience is a virtue,” he purrs, and is surprised that his own voice is just as wrecked as Michael looks.

The elder only glares back, but its edge is taken as he suddenly throws his head back, displaying the whole length of his neck for Lucifer. The Morning Star’s hungry mouth immediately latches to the golden pulse, sucking up the rapid fluttering beats.

That is enough for Michael to wrap his arms around Lucifer’s back and for the last time turn over their positions.

Michael pushes up on his arms. No matter how Lucifer clings to the forearms, how many bright red little crescent dips he leaves Michael won’t budge. He is royal with the golden halo blazing around his head. The lightning is too pale compared to the flame burning among human shaped silhouettes looming over Lucifer fitting perfectly in the V of his thighs.

He skims a once bleeding finger over Lucifer’s entrance, just a breath of a touch, but now it is his turn to curl his lips into a predatory smile as Lucifer shudders.

“It’s not that bad,” Michael murmurs deeper than the roll of thunder outside. “Fitting this body,” The blunt head of Michael’s cock just barely pushes into Lucifer, a reminder of what it feels like to be filled, but as of yet it’s only another shudder tearing through his frame. “Feeling all it feels. The pleasure.”

Without any warning Michael slams into Lucifer, and the blond cannot keep the cry in.

He should have known it. Michael doesn’t give up control just like that. This is his seal to mark up Lucifer and he will do it however he pleases. However, when he starts moving, working up a rapid, unforgiving pace Lucifer could hardly care. He is clinging to the broad shoulders for dear life. Michael managed to demolish all his defences. The words the other purrs on a truly wrecked voice flow through him freely.

And _oh_ do they make clinging to sanity that much harder!

Michael remembers. Michael remembers the first name he had given Lucifer; the name through which he had laid his first, broken claim – so innocent then, but _now_.

One whole eternity pent up in a single moan is what tips Lucifer over the white blaze of pleasure. A drop of fire in the heart of the frozen Morning Star.

Lucifer wants to cry, to let a sob escape him to ease the pressure, but he just holds on to Michael even stronger. His fingers dig deep in muscle and he would feel guilty for the warm blood pooling beneath his teeth another day. His whole being clenches, hungry to swallow Michael in, to envelop him from the world, keep him inside where their graces sing and unite perfectly—

Where a firestorm erupts and envelops his frozen core. It bursts into a million shards. Lucifer’s blood tainted fingers knot in Michael’s hair, he pulls until he can seal his trembling lips on Michael’s panting mouth, and forcing the barrier of his clenched teeth apart in one stifled moan he breathes a billion brilliant stars that Michael has to swallow but they still keep flowing.

Muscles pulled tight, fire-lit and star-dotted Michael is shaking.

One of Michael’s hands slips from its death grip on Lucifer’s hip, up to his shoulder and slides into the pool of lightning bolts, chaos and stardust that are the soft feathers at the base of Lucifer’s wings. Michael cries out, the sound of the Earth splitting apart, his fingers close around the ice-edged flashes of light that burn in his blood, and Lucifer is lost in bliss and torture.

His wings flare, stretching wide on either side of the bed. Feathers scatter, stars fall from the night-lit sky. Their light dance in Michael’s eyes, he is burning, burning, _burning up_ —

 

 

Outside the storm stills. It is only the wind howling and rattling at doors and windows and tearing off the loose roof tiles in the distance.

Lucifer turns his head to the side. Michael’s eyelashes flutter against his shoulder. The blinks grow lazier and longer each time, until they settle fanning long and dark over his cheeks and the archangel’s breathing evens out.

Even with the sweat cooling on his skin he is warm – Lucifer lets out a relieved sigh he doesn’t remember he was holding. His fingertips, light as a butterfly’s wings caress the length of the other’s spine and card through the black locks.

As much as he can tell Michael’s grace hasn’t shrunken a bit. That’s good.

Michael is still strong. Graceful in all sense of the word. An overwhelming, beautifully terrifying presence like the endless navy blue of the slumbering ocean.

 

 

_“Swords are loyal. They take the blows and never disappoint. Unbreakable in their owner’s hand. Obedient. Do you remember your orders?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“All of them?”_

_“From the very first.”_

_“Are you ready to follow them? Without doubt, without hesitation?”_

_“… I will.”_

_There was a frown, not unlike a whip cracking, and he screamed out in pain. An icy shower made the scar sting even more._

_“Are you going to serve your purpose?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“You’ll attack when you are told, and you’ll protect as you are ordered.”_

_“Or I’ll break trying.”_

_“You **cannot** break! You bow and you stand tall and sharp. You serve and you wage war on the nations. You are trustworthy in the terror your name instils in the heart of Evil. What are you?”_

_“…”_

_“What are you?”_

_“… A sword.”_

 

 

When Lucifer wakes the pale rays of the sun have already started filtering through the windows. His heart hammers in his chest with painful thumps that make him sick. The pillow under his cheek is wet.

The burn is alien. A force that stabs at his eyes from the inside.

Michael stirs, but refuses to uncurl from Lucifer’s side.

It’s a fragment of Michael in his mind! A pressure he refuses to take. He doesn’t even want to think about it. Not a word, not about the power that once shook and created galaxies, or the doom it had put on the bright light.

“Luce?” Michael mumbles sleepy. His head just thudded on the mattress as Lucifer pulled his arm away. “What’s wrong?”

Lucifer ignores him in his haste to gather his clothes and quickly pull them on.

“Luca?” Michael calls out again, his voice clear. Vulnerable. A painful slash in Lucifer’s heart.

For one second he halts in his steps, he stands rigid in the middle of the room hold captive by Michael’s begging eyes. Lucifer so desperately wants to turn back, tackle Michael back on the bed until the pillows and sheets swallow him up in a soft nest, cradle his face with his shaking hands and kiss him. Kiss him for his betrayal, for all the pain and loneliness that is just about to tear him apart. Kiss him, and cry, washing Michael’s beautiful evanescent face—

But he doesn’t.

He doesn’t even slam the door behind himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prayer idea I totally owe credits to a tumblr post I always lose. So please, someone who remembers that short post about Lucifer murmuring a prayer as he kisses along Michael's chest/stomach please let me know and I'll link it! My michifer tag is a mess, and I'm afraid I didn't reblog it :(


	14. My Sunshine

Lucifer isn’t prepared to face Michael after this. What _this_ is might be a little bit of a problem to grasp. No, definitely not because he is ashamed or regretful of his momentary weakness in surrendering to his selfish desires. Lucifer is selfish, greedy and unused to being denied anything. If anyone is to be blamed for that, than it is Michael. Or, _damn_ , it is everything that used to praise the Morning Star for his radiant beauty.

No, there is nothing rueful in his heart about Michael kissing his breath away or fucking him into the sheets until they melt into each other. _They were made for this!_

But then, why can’t he bear the thought of looking Michael in the face?

For the night Michael was comfortable to let his scarred back bathe in the white flash of lightning, but ever since Lucifer walked out on him the long sleeves returned with additional layers to cover up his body.

_Michael’s body_. The bruises left on his shoulder, a still raw wound in the double arch of his teeth; the pink claw marks; the cut on his thigh—They don’t heal. _Why_ don’t they heal?! And why does Michael’s grace push back against his whenever Lucifer attempts to liberate him from all the annoying misery of the flesh?!

No, no. More importantly: Why does Michael never tell him when Lucifer is causing him pain? Especially when he doesn’t want to!

_You cannot break_.

He’ll have to tell Michael to go away. Find his own place to live at. Otherwise Lucifer really will hurt him if he forgets about his situation for just one second and—

And _that_ Lucifer wouldn’t survive.

Only if the words weren’t so hard to find!

 

For two more days, Lucifer manages to avoid Michael. It is difficult because, after a few hours it took to get out of bed, the elder has been actively seeking him out. Whenever he can grab a hold of his brother the hand on Lucifer’s arm is scorching and makes blisters break on his skin, which, in turn, gets Michael all bitter and anxious. Until yet another fruitless attempt at a conversation at the end of day two has Michael snap like a twig.

“If you don’t want me around just say so,” he snarls, jerking his hand back, rubbing at his wrist. “You don’t need to freeze up on me.”

Lucifer didn’t even realize his body temperature has dropped so significantly. He wants to blurt that it’s not against Michael, that it was just an accident, but then his glare cannot even reach the other’s face. The edge of the golden smouldering eyes has him cast his gaze away.

“Fine.”

That’s all what Michael spits before he turns on his heels and leaves Lucifer to his own thoughts.

When Lucifer marches up the stairs and throws the door to Michael’s room open, the world suddenly grows silent. Only the blood rushes in his ears so loud he cannot even hear it. This is the sight he has envisioned so many times the past days, this is what he wanted, but actually seeing Michael packing his clothes away in a bag gets Lucifer to break.

No, no, this is wrong. So wrong. So, so wrong.

“Where are you going?” Lucifer hisses.

The tension grows impossibly in Michael’s shoulders. He doesn’t turn around nor cut off his determined packing.

“Aren’t you impossible to please?” Michael asks back tightly. “If you hate me being around you shouldn’t have pulled me out from the Cage!”

“I didn’t,” Lucifer says, but his voice is just a breath uncertain.

“Really? Then who did, because I certainly didn’t climb out on my own!”

Michael pulls the zipper closed on his bag; it nearly tears off at the trembling force of his hand. He turns around.

“You hate the sight of me. You hate touching me, and yet you won’t let me go. Just make up your mind finally!”

Lucifer doesn’t say a word, just stands his ground and Michael’s chilling gaze.

For a long minute they only stare at each other, then Michael’s lips pull back into a vicious snarl and starts to walk past Lucifer, but just as he is about to sidestep his brother, the younger mirrors his motion, towering in front of him. At first Michael doesn’t seem deterred. Immediately, as if he had expected the move, he takes a step in the other direction, but Lucifer copies that too. Moreover, he also takes a half pace forward that leaves Michael either bump chest with him or rile back.

A spark flares deep in his big brother’s breast, his eyes lit up, and he is beautiful as unconsciously he slowly melts into a battle stance as he is determined to tear his way through the immovable mountain that Lucifer challenges him with. However, the scars, the blood is all too fresh in Lucifer’s memory. Fresh enough to keep him grounded for the time being. All he does is block Michael’s way, attempting to crowd him back into the heart of his room.

“ _Lucifer_ ,” Michael growls warningly, but even this grim attempt at breaking free is barred.

Lucifer pushes the flat of his palms against Michael’s chest, careful not to put too great pressure on a single bone or just one side of the ribcage. It is just a gentle shove with his powers, but enough to get Michael stagger back. The back of his knees hit the bed; he loses balance and needs a hand to keep standing. When he turns his eyes are ablaze.

“Is that so?” The darkness creeping into his tone makes hairline fractures run along Lucifer’s frame like thick spider webs. “Are you pitying me?”

“Michael—“

“You think I’m weak. You think that I wouldn’t last in a fair fight, that it would be humiliating for you.” There is a smile, violent and all sharp teeth that Lucifer recognizes from one horrible nightmare from the Cage. “Killing me now, _accidentally_ , wouldn’t satisfy your monstrous fantasy of power, would it?”

“I never wanted to kill you,” Lucifer says, voice growing breathless. “Not you, Michael.”

“Funny. Because I remember you crushing my throat with your bare hands. I remember my skull shattering under your heel.” Shadow crawls in the depth of Michael’s eyes. “It terrifies you, doesn’t it, little brother. Now the blood on your hands cannot wash off. There is no one to put me back together. That now you have to take the blame.” After a short pause, though, the spark glints out. Michael turns resigned. Calm. “Not that there’re many to blame you.”

Lucifer realizes horrified that his lips are quivering. He has to swallow the tremors down before he can force his voice past the lump in his throat to demand, “Who are you?”

_This isn’t his brother. This isn’t his Michael._

“I’m sorry,” Michael says immediately, features melting from their sharp iron-like lines. “It was an unnecessary outburst. I’m sorry.”

He ruefully shakes his head and just leans down to pick up his discarded bag, when Lucifer finds his voice again.

“Who are you?”

Michael blinks at him, long, confused, with that head tilt that shows how badly he wants to solve a puzzle. Then he frowns, in irritation but in a beat it gives way to a glimmer in his eyes and the eons slip away from his face – and _oh_ he is so beautiful…

“ _I am Michael_ ,” he says, but instead of launching into listing his endless titles like Prince of the Heavenly Host, and the most dreaded Sword of Heaven, he continues on the very same tongue that still shakes Lucifer to the bone, “ _Your brother. Who loves you more than anything._ ”

Lucifer is crying.

Tears spill down his face, because yes, _this_ is the brother he had cursed for centuries and hated for eons and loved terribly from the very first moment his thousand eyes opened to see him. Anything dark that had settled over him is all just a part of a cruel game God is still playing to keep them separated, the sun and his light, the star and his fire, because He is afraid of the two together—

“Lucifer,” Michael calls, cupping his cheeks gently, worry trembling in his fingertips. “Did I hurt you, my Light?”

Lucifer shakes his head violently from side to side, tries to swallow back his tears, his pride, but there are just even more crystal tracks running down to drop to the ground from his chin.

“Shush. I’m sorry, Lucifer. I didn’t mean it. You know I didn’t mean it.”

But he knows that Michael did. He did and he was right. So Lucifer throws himself at his brother who immediately envelops him in a warm embrace, an illusion of security as Lucifer sobs into the crook of his neck, “Don’t leave me, Micha. Don’t leave me. I need you. I need you so much.”

It should be more difficult to tuck his head under Michael’s chin, to snuggle as close as he can to the fire in the other’s chest, but kneeling on the ground he is tiny, a single star however bright in the vast galaxy.

In that very same spot as Michael murmurs “I’m here, I’m always here for you. I just want to see you happy, Morning Star. _My Morning Star_.” Lucifer is just as selfish as a black hole in the middle of that galaxy, greedy for the whole world to rotate around him alone. _Until at one point he swallows it all down_.

 


	15. My Moonlight

“Michael,” Lucifer calls after his big brother, and falls in step following the flow of his robe without any further sound. The visor of the helmet might hide Michael’s face from his prying eyes, but the air sitting restless on his shoulders speak of trouble.

Lucifer tries again to reach out when they enter the security of Michael’s chambers, the older coming to a halt finally at the high balcony’s marble railing. He takes off the helmet, his thick black braids laced with gold fall over his broad shoulders. A heavy sigh rips off his chest, but as if gone with the wind most of the burden rolls off Michael as well. He turns and expands a hand to Lucifer with a gentle smile.

“Lucifer,” Michael rumbles deep like the ocean’s eternal waves; he cups Lucifer’s face between two broad hands and with the sacred solemnity of worship Michael kisses his little brother on both cheeks and long and loving on the forehead. “How are you, my Morning Star?”

It is always hard to bite back the smile stretching at his lips, to put out the fluttering flame of being loved when Michael is so close, but now the worry has climbed to new heights in Lucifer’s heart. He takes Michael’s hands in his own, taking a step back to distance himself a tiny bit from the burning radiation of his big brother’s adoration.

“I should ask you the same,” Lucifer says firmly, eyes raking over Michael’s dented, dust dulled armour, the dirt smeared around his reddened eyes and the blood trickling down in the hide of one loose braid at his temple. “What did Father tell you?”

The sea green gaze drops to the ground before it flutters far away into the distance. Lucifer knows what is there. The Pearly Gates.

“Michael.”

“He didn’t receive me,” Michael says with false ease in his tone. “He is very busy these days.”

They both know that this is not true. Lucifer just saw Joshua walk past Michael when the Prince of the Heavenly Host strolled through the guided entrance to Father’s halls. The lesser angel hasn’t come out ever since. Unlike Michael who barely spent a few minutes inside.

Lucifer forces a smile on his face. “Probably He is stunned by the good work you’ve done.”

Michael nods absentmindedly, his gaze resting on his helmet. As the frown deepens Lucifer’s heart drops.

“No. Don’t—“

“I must go back.” Michael says tone solemn, final.

“You can’t. Whatever evil has slipped into this world… Michael, you can’t. Not so quickly. You’ve just returned!”

But Michael talks over him, “I haven’t fulfilled my mission. Why else would Father reject seeing me? I have to make sure all is prepared and safe for the new creations.”

“Michael, listen to me!”

But when the other turns back to Lucifer, determination is an abiding crease on his noble forehead. Lucifer knows all is lost. The glint of fighting spirit makes his brother’s gaze feverish, there is nothing he can do now.

“Do not worry, Lucifer. This is what Father commands of me.”

Michael brushes a quick kiss to the top of Lucifer’s forehead, and the next time he finds his voice the First is already opening the door.

“You can’t do this Michael! You can’t hurt yourself like this!” Lucifer shouts after him.

“Swords don’t break,” Michael answers and soon only the corridor echoes back the sound of his steps.

_But you’re not a sword!_

 

                                                                           

 

Lucifer wakes to Michael gently shaking his shoulder, sitting at the edge of his bed. When he wants to bolt, a hand at the middle of his chest keeps him in place.

“Hey. You were just dreaming.” Michael murmurs.

“How, if I don’t sleep?” Lucifer rasps.

Michael just shrugs and holds a glass of water to his lips. “Human habits are tedious, but it doesn’t mean they are all bad.”

Lucifer downs the glass in one big gulp, and relishes in the water coating his throat. Now it seems his vessel is giving up on him from the inside as well. He glances at his brother suspiciously – he has made up his mind that no matter what he won’t let Michael use a drop of his ebbing grace on Lucifer’s vessel.

“Did I wake you?”

“No. I was going either way.”

“Where?”

The older sends him a reassuring smile. “I told you earlier. I’m volunteering.”

His brows pull painfully into a frown, “You shouldn’t be going out in your… condition.”

_Damn, Lucifer is supposed to take care of Michael not the other way round!_

“Don’t worry,” Michael pushes himself to his feet. “I’m still your big brother. Which means that I get to fuss over you. Lucifer, you have to accept that I need to do something with myself. I have to learn what I have to adapt to.”

As per usual, with a press of burning lips to Lucifer’s clammy forehead Michael slips out of the room.

 

The day has turned into late afternoon by the time Michael arrives back.

Lucifer is hiding away in the shadows of his roses. The cool, velvety shades feel much better, soothing. Nothing like the piercing flashes of ethereal light slipping on rainbow white petals, tabby marble and golden ornaments. Michael, on the other hand, settles farthest from the shadows, certain that even as the sun goes down the darkness won’t creep over his feet. He leans back on his hands and turns his face to bathe in the sun.

“Why do I feel like I want to die when it’s actually you who’s dying?” Lucifer grumbles. His skin pulls around his form until he swears he can see his grace shining through the hairline fractures of his veins. There are already purple bruises eating themselves to the surface to form another chain of bed-sores.

The older takes his grace burning out and losing power with valour and his chin held high. He doesn't break, he doesn't scream and cuss. He wants to _adapt_. Lucifer on the other hand…

“It’d probably do you good if you got out sometimes.”

Lucifer scoffs. “I do, and whenever I return you give me this _glare_.”

“What glare?” Michael doesn’t even squint at him. Maybe he is even smiling a tiny bit.

“Where you expect a horde of demons to follow in my tow.”

“Oh, that one.”

“Yeah, that one.”

Michael leans back on his elbows, and for a few minutes only the traffic on the roads are the sound filling the air. Lucifer is desperately searching for some possible topic to talk about. He cannot last long just staring at Michael, even though he is still more radiant than the sunshine caressing his features. The thick wall of silence that recently bars him from sneaking into the other’s head to pry at his thoughts, his pain and needs, makes these moments of closeness nothing but torture.

“You know, you’ve never told me what those angels wanted from you.”

“Nothing you haven’t heard.”

“Michael. You didn’t tell me _anything_.”

He receives no answer.

“You devoured a grace of one of our brothers, it must be something.” Still no answer. “You wanted to act like brothers again—“

“From next week I’ll have a job.”

“ _Michael_.”

“Not just volunteering, but a full-time, which makes scheduling that much harder, but I should be fine—“

“Damn it, Michael, stop!” Lucifer snaps, and he also feels the skin break on his temple down to his jawline. “Do you even hear yourself?”

Finally, Michael’s eyes open. His gaze zeroes in on the open wound on his brother’s face.

“I made perfect sense.”

“No, you didn’t,” Lucifer says, taking a cautious step back when Michael stands. No. Michael is not going to waste any of his grace on him. “You’re clearly evading the topic, which means that it troubles you.”

“My problems concern me and me alone. Heaven is none of your business, Lucifer.”

“Of course not. But don’t think I’ll let you burn out just like this! Did you try if that lesser angel’s grace could fill in for yours? Maybe even replace it—?”

“Who made _you_ your brother’s keeper, hm?”

Lucifer snatches the hand reaching out for him. The breath hitches in Michael’s throat at the sting of pain. To amend his outburst Lucifer pulls him closer, mindful of the hard stare and the grace now filling up the veins of the other’s vessel. With reverence he has only ever felt for his big brother he presses his lips to Michael’s knuckles; right there where the Prince’s ring would be. Meanwhile his icy gaze never breaks away from Michael’s surprised eyes.

“Would it kill you to let someone take care of you just this once? Just a little bit?”

Michael doesn’t answer. But then in a flash his free hand is cupping the back of Lucifer’s head and he is pulling the blond onto his mouth.

This kiss is soft and sweet; there is no twinge of healing grace. Closed lips on closed lips, pure, and dare he say _innocent_.

 

Another night it is Michael who steps up to Lucifer and playfully kisses him when the younger still doesn’t snap out of his daze. Before he could flinch away, though, Michael takes both of his hands in his, _warm as if he had just pulled them away from the fire_ , and looks up at him from below thick lashes.

Lucifer’s throat suddenly runs dry.

“I want to use your wings,” Michael says.

“Pardon me?” Lucifer arches a questioning eyebrow and silently wonders why Michael has never learnt how to make proper requests.

“I can’t fly you anywhere now, can I?”

“ _Why_ would you want to do that? And why _use_ my wings?”

“Because I want to surprise you. You need to chill a bit.”

Lucifer only stares in amazement. Then he sighs. Fine, if this is what Michael’s crazy heart desires so much. It hopefully won’t be in the middle of some battle of pagans. That—well, that would be highly unpleasant.

“Okay. However you think this’d work.”

Michael smiles. His hands settle cradling Lucifer’s head, two fingers on each side gently pressed to his temples. Michael’s forehead is pressed to his, the warm breath fans over his lips.

“Just do as I say,” Michael whispers.

The next word thrums through Lucifer’s head— _Fly_ —and as if at his own command his wings tremble, the joint grows tense at his back, ready, ready, ready… There is also a picture forming behind his eyelids, too blurry, lines flickering reluctant to settle, hiding from Lucifer’s vision, until with blinding sharpness the picture flashes—

“ _Now._ ”

 

The air embracing them is fresh with the slight tinge of salt and the crispiness of endless miles and miles of water, green and snow-blue mingle in his mind even before Lucifer opens his eyes. Michael slowly unwraps his arms from around him as he tucks away his wings.

“What do you think?” he asks softly.

Lucifer looks around, careful to keep the frown of suspicion on his forehead.

They are standing on top of some cliff, rocks hard and flat beneath the rubble under his feet. There is a silver strip of a slender river running to his left in the imposing shadow of the rocks towering like an impenetrable wall further away. Right next to his feet the tinkling river takes a death dive into the deep, running down and splattering green and warm black life on the grey-brown rocks. On the side it breaks into white foam, and just the roaring sound of its rebellious cry at the fall the river splits the earth beneath in half as it runs for yards into the sea.

What a fascinating sight.

It takes minutes before Lucifer can tear his gaze away from the waterfall and look up at the blood tainted sky sprinkled with glimmering snowflakes.

“Quite pleasant-looking,” he says.

His response is a short laugh, “I thought you’d be more appreciative of this. There is nothing human in such beauty after all.”

Lucifer doesn’t answer. It would be too complicated to try and stomp down the ever bubbling anger he feels for God when Michael gives his best attempt to get him admit how His creations are precious and beautiful. He doesn’t care. This Earth might be the last perfect handiwork of their Father, it might even be a faint replica of Eden but thinking about the ignorance their Father treats all this with—

No. He rather just settles down next to Michael, dangling their feet over the great height.  Well, great for Michael at least.

“You don’t adapt that well,” he notes. “You are still too bold.”

“What should I be afraid of?” Michael asks with a smile hiding in his voice.

“Those rocks below wouldn’t cushion your fall.”

“There’s no need for that.” After a beat of silence Michael brushes his shoulder to his brother’s playfully. “Unless you push me off.”

Lucifer chuckles, but something bitter scrapes at his throat. “I could pull and push you all I want, you’d never budge.”

The forced easy laughter and the rush of the water so close couldn’t tune out the thought Lucifer catches the depressing undertone rooting deep in their hearts.

_Not where you can see me._

 

 “Why did we stop doing this?” Michael sighs softly.

The moon has climbed up on the inky dome of the sky. It is silver white right across from the two archangels who were once witness to her creation.

“I think it had something to do with my Fall.”

At that Michael shifts to turn flat on his back, and Lucifer has to pull his hand away from where it was playing with the dark locks. He cranes his neck so that he can look up into the blue eyes, his gaze serious, but his voice remains soft. “I meant even before that,” he makes a vague motion with his hand, as if the scenery he waves at is the very same as the Garden of Eden. “We used to spend so much time together. Why did we stop?”

Honestly, Lucifer doesn’t know. It was such a long, long time ago that Michael’s head in his lap is barely a familiar weight.

“You just stopped seeking me out,” Michael adds, and there is no way Lucifer could snap back at him when his voice is so devoid of any malicious edge or blame.

“Because you turned really busy. No more time for childish stuff,” Lucifer shrugs eventually.

“I’m sorry.”

With his fingers buried in his brother’s thick black hair the words form so easily at the back of his tongue. It would be so easy to say _Yeah, me too_. It slips so easily to the tip of his tongue, but before they could leave their mortal print in the fabric of the gentle night Lucifer seals his lips.

He has nothing to be sorry about. He had been wronged. He is not to blame here.

So, eventually he just nods his acceptance, and leans down to peck Michael on the lips. That at least makes him smile.

 

A breeze brushes the top of the mountain peaks, rustling the golden-green leaves like an immortal regretful sigh.

 


	16. The sound of Silence

Soon the wall separating their minds turns from solid rock to ever rippling bolts of electricity. The noise that once formed crystal clear words no matter how rushed is now reduced to wavering rumble with peeks that could make anyone scream in pain, and with long-drawn hollow dents that could break the greatest warrior.

Lucifer probably picks up on the signs sooner. And even then his heart is frozen even more than his coldly burning grace.

This is the power of silence. And the power of fear.

It sends him out on quests to seek the old forgotten temples of lost knowledge in hopes for a cure, or just something that could help Michael cling to his essence a little longer. He wouldn’t admit how he might only be desperate to get away from witnessing the same signs that he had experienced firsthand down in the Cage. Those memories of going crazy aren’t that distant anymore.

Even then, Michael remains stubborn, carrying out whatever he calls his mission for adapting. However, Lucifer cannot really imagine what kind of _job_ he keeps while he is so nervous, fidgety and irritated all the time.

The deepest hollow among the days on the ever dipping slope of darkness is when Lucifer stays home to collect his thoughts. As per usual he is out in his garden, growing long extinct plants with crystal bells and gold stamen. The seed of his desperate boredom slowly grows into thick silver tabby tree, whose leaves cast wavering sapphire shadows when the sun shines through them. It is a beautiful, calming sight.

Until the same night it goes up in blue flames.

“Michael!” Lucifer hollers, all walls shaking in the house.

His brother’s cry answers. They meet in the corridor outside of Michael’s room.

“What was that for?!” Lucifer demands, but the same moment he opened his mouth Michael spoke too with hurried words.

“I _need_ to sleep. Don’t you understand? I need to—I have to – then, then at least it’s silen—calm, it’s calm. I don’t have to listen to—to this beehive in my head! Don’t you understand, Lucifer?!”

Lucifer takes a moment to listen. To swallow and take a deep breath. He takes Michael’s chin in his hand; the green eyes flutter every direction but would never settle on his face. Also, his hands fidget with the edge of his blanket draped around his shoulders. He feels cold.

“Th-that tree. That tree was growing too loud. I can hear everything. My breaths—I can’t take it all, I can’t, I need to sleep, but then it’s silent, and I can’t—!”

“It’s okay, Micha,” Lucifer hums, thumb scraping on the stubble growing on his brother’s jaw. “It’ll pass. You’ll be okay.”

These lies, whenever he tells them, they hurt so bad. He wonders how Michael did it all the time. Claim that everything will be all right when he knew that the world was just about to pull out from right under their feet.

He looks up at Lucifer, doubt under the fever-sheen in his eyes.

“Trust me on this one,” the Morning Star smiles, palms heavy on the other’s shoulders. “This doesn’t last forever.”

The most frightening thing? Michael trusts Lucifer on his word. He smiles, weak but true, and allows his brother to wrap him up in his arms and guide him back into his bed, keeping him company with the steady rumble of his soft voice until fatigue finally overtakes his mind.

                                                                  

 

 

When even the maddening drill of white noise disappears, they scream at each other for a whole week to fill the silence in Michael’s head with blood and tears. Anything is better than the sound of silence.

 

 

Heaven’s abandoned Firstborn can keep up an act of desperate composedness by day, but the night finds him hunched over a bottle of liqueur. First he drinks away his pent-up anger and frustration, but if Lucifer dares to ask him anything while still in that phase he is ready to blow up the room he holed himself up in. He did. Once when his little brother suggested he took up the habit of wretched drinking from his one and true vessel. Next morning Michael was devoured by guilt. Hand in hand with a wicked hangover it wasn’t nice.

This newly picked up habit gets Lucifer worried.

So now, instead he just waits until Michael clumsily plops down next to him, either out in the backyard, at the roots of the tree he burnt into oblivion, or on the couch. Sometimes he just sits there, bleary eyes reflecting the glow of the TV screen. Sometimes he gives in to his primal needs and sloppily demands Lucifer’s attention.

“Does that much wine seriously affect you like this?”

“No. _Duh_.” Michael says, but the sway of his torso claims otherwise. “Okay, I might be a little tips-ay.”

“A little?” Lucifer echoes, but doesn’t protest when he climbs on his lap.

He actually enjoys this warm bubble surrounding his brother, and so it envelopes him as well. The layers and layers of velvety fabric, smothering, but not really because with the drunken little smile it reminds him of those times he was wrapped up in star-dotted wings. On top of that Michael’s mouth is soft and pliant, his kiss sloppy and wet, giggle quilted.

How could Lucifer feel guilty in Heaven?

Slowly Michael starts to grind his hips down, and the fingers sneaked to the back of his head grow stronger in their grip as the elder’s movements grow more insistent, demanding, desperate.

Lucifer’s palm squeezes, leaving fading red marks on the narrow hips. Enough to snap Michael out of his rutting.

“Have you eaten today?” he asks.

Colour climbs high on his brother’s cheeks, though if for embarrassment, arousal or a flicker of anger, it is hard to tell.

“Not much,” he admits.

“That’s why so little wine gets you drunk.”

“Ap’rently.”

“Come on. Let’s do something about it.” But Michael wouldn’t budge. “You’ll feel horrible in the morning again.”

Michael doesn’t care. He only wraps his arms around Lucifer’s neck, pressing his heated cheeks to the cool skin

“Don’t be such a child.”

His only response is a headshake. Then… he feels something wet drop on his collarbone.

“Michael?”

“It’s so quiet, Luca,” he mumbles weak, sobs quivering in his voice. “Like… like before. Before you were there for me. It’s so quiet.”

Lucifer puts his arms around his brother, caressing gentle lines up and down his spine.

“Sing for me? Please? Like you used to when we were younger.”

He wants to protest. He wants to explain what bad idea this is, because he doesn’t remember any of the hymns or praise. And even if he did, his voice has turned bitter. He couldn’t sing grace to a God who lets his sons suffer, and how he has long ago twisted the words of worship into wicked curses. Instead he seeks morsels of songs in his mind. Something he last heard on the radio turned on every minute of the day—

“ _There’s a lady who’s sure  
 All that glitters is gold…_ ”

He keeps his voice soft, humming the tune when memory fails him with the lyrics. He sings of a stairway to Heaven, none of them will ever see.

 

Those nights seem to be the worst however, when despite all his attempts to keep the façade of strength and valour Michael’s shuddering only ceases after long hours of lying in Lucifer’s embrace. Until one day Michael steels himself and decides to sleep in his own bed. It is horrible, _terrifying_ , because there is no way Lucifer could cut through this impenetrable wall of silence. He cannot know if Michael is suffering from the impending craziness of self-induced solitude or if he had given up and succumbed to this cruel fate. He doesn’t know which option makes him more furious.

The only thing for sure is that as he wraps his arms around his own torso, pretending not to feel the cold, he weeps silently for the both of them. Tears of sorrow from one eye, and tears of rage from the other spill down his face to freeze into crystals on his pillow.

 

After lonely nights of thinking Lucifer is the one to reintroduce their little outings into their weekly schedule. Michael might be working for five days and being nauseously nervous and hungover on the sixth but if Lucifer tunes in his own searching with those working days then that still leaves them a day for each other.

This serves for the sake of both of their sanity. (Also it keeps Michael away from his liqueur for one more night.)

Once they go to Adiyaman, because Lucifer wants to show how his temper has settled. He doesn’t mind showing Michael crafts of the human hand as far as he can witness the lively glint return to his brother’s eyes. They marvel at the blue uneven lines of mountains in the distance and wander among the ruins of giant statues. Michael caresses the lions’ shoulders and they seem to purr in appreciation. He runs his hand along the webbing of fractures of a left-behind head of some ancient ruler and thoughtful sorrow settles over his brows.

When they leave, in the wake of Lucifer’s wings a hurricane raves and massive rocks block the ways that would lead up to the ruins.

In the Blyde River’s Canyon Michael finally smiles. They sit on wobbly-bridge shaped rocks and dangle their feet in the rushing water giggling like children at its power. There Michael tells him about his job, finally revealing how he is working at a restaurant as a waiter. He is tight-lipped about how much he likes dealing with customers, but Lucifer suspects he isn’t over the moon to cater to human pettiness and complaints. But he likes his colleagues. Most of them anyways. There is a college girl who reminds him of Raphael and they are good friends.

From the top of the cliffs of the Meteora Lucifer drops pieces of ice the size of eggs on top of the monastery. He grins wide when the monks and tourists run about wondering where the hailstorm is coming from. Michael frowns in disapproval, but doesn’t stop him.

                                                                  

Finally, walking in the misty forest of Mount Haguro Michael asks,

“What kind of job do you think would fit me?”

Lucifer stares back at his brother as if he just asked if the Sun circulated around the Earth. “You _have_ a full time job.”

“Yes,” Michael nods. “This is why it's a hypothetical question.”

Lucifer chews on his lower lip in thought. “You know I'm not really into this,” he murmurs. “I have no idea about the options.”

“No, you are the best. You know me best.”

That is rather questionable Lucifer thinks a bit sourly.  

“Why does it bother you?”

“All this while, I have been acting general, governor. Now I don't even have a host. Or the power thereof to manage something as marvellously complicated as Heaven.”

“Is it that complicated now?” Lucifer still vaguely remembers when Michael sang odes to how perfect the system ruling their home was and how he couldn't wait to help with it even more. In contrast to that excitedly beaming face now Michael screws up his features in a distinctive shade of distaste.

“It's a mess.”

“Then problem solved. We conserve your grace, somehow we unlock the rest and that's it. You can go back to your throne among the clouds administering brainless soldiers and fight the forces of evil.”

During his rant the initial bafflement slowly shifted on the elder's face and it finally settled on something akin to sadness and deep disappointment.

It makes Lucifer snap. “How do you expect me to believe you aren't suicidal when whenever I bring up that you stay alive you make such a sour face?!”

“It's not like that.”

“Then what?”

“It's...  is that all I'm good for?”

“You are really good at that I suppose,” Lucifer says, now more careful.

“Then I am of no use anymore.”

“What? Of course you are! You just need to hold on a little longer until we find a way—“

“But until then what?! I can't sit by idly watching your roses grow while you go totally crazy in search for a cure that doesn't exist!”

“You can't say that for sure!”

At first, for only a blink of an eye Michael looks almost frightened at Lucifer’s cutting tone, but then he bravely resumes to his big brotherly calm.

“You are right, I can’t,” he admits pushing his hands in the pockets of his jeans as he continues walking.

When he is a good couple of paces away, when his voice could have the excuse to mingle into the mist if Lucifer doesn’t want to listen to him, he speaks up softly again.

“But also try to understand me. If I can’t help the Host, and right now I can’t give them what Armaita asked from me… That would make my life two such great failures I could not bear continue living it anymore.”

In three long strides Lucifer catches up to Michael. He doesn’t look over, just walks with him, matching his steps trying his best to channel into his thoughts.

“What is so urgent about it now?” he asks gently. “You didn’t want to go back to Heaven. Not even when you learnt… whatever you learnt from that angel’s grace.”

Lucifer glances over at him, shy, afraid of what he might see: the broad shoulders are drawn up to Michael’s ears, straining to hold up all the weight of the world.

Despite the mist surrounding them in its humid, cool embrace the Devil feels a new spark of hatred spring in his breast. It flares and catches easily on the inside of his ribcage like on dry wood. Their cowardly Father left this entire terrible burden on his dear brother to bear. Too much, too soon, too irresponsible. Too despicable.

Michael sighs heavily.

“The entire Host has fallen from Heaven.”

“No.”

The elder nods solemnly.

“Then what are you wasting your time here with me? You are the only one who didn’t fall, are you kidding me?”

“Lucifer.” Michael interrupts him, smooth and low. A big brother’s soothing touch just before the pin-feathered could dive into something recklessly stupid. “I fell further than any of them.”

“But—it can’t be just about your wings!”

“It’s not. But they don’t know either about my lack of ability to fly or how my power is dimming by the day. Our brothers and sisters would need a _strong_ leader. Someone who is more than a name, more than old regulations.” He pinches his lips into a bitter line. “They would expect me to fly them back to Heaven immediately and then rain down God’s wrath on whoever caused all this.”

Lucifer shakes his head. He feels numb.

“I could picture you do just that.”

A bewildered chuckle puffs up from Michael’s lips. He turns his head to the distant grey sky, closes his eyes and says almost to himself, “I thought I’d lost the will to change.” He chuckles again. “But here I am. Ah, but I can’t bear this state of helplessness! I _must_ help them Lucifer.”

“You just said you can’t.”

“If they are to stay here for longer, if Heaven cannot be opened up again…” His voice stifles on that thought. Lucifer, too, bristles. “They need to learn what they should expect, how to adapt. To the pain, the urges and the circumstances. If only I could find a profession, a function where I could help them! I need that for the time when I won’t have a name, a title to be recognized and obeyed by. Do you understand me, Lucifer?”

Maybe. Maybe he does, but it is really hard. This deep devotion is so foreign and while it has always been something he found admirable it is just as foolish. Michael doesn’t know how to conserve himself, how _not_ to share himself with everyone else he calls family. Or Army.

He inclines his head, just for the peace of it.

The angels fell. _The angels fell_. This is all that’s cruising in his mind with the deep clang of a pebble bouncing about the walls of a bottomless well. How can there be so many sharing his fate…?

“How about teaching?” He offers just to stir up the fog both in the forest and in his own brain. “You have a long history of looking after fledglings. How difficult could human children be after all that?”

“Do you think I'd be good at that?” Michael asks, hope lighting his tone.

“Sure. I mean you saw everything that's out there being created. You know everything that happened more accurately than any book. Plus I— _we_ learnt everything from you.”

“Everything?”

“There was no one else around to learn from.”

“I don’t think I have the patience for it anymore.” Lucifer is shocked to a halt by the quick change in Michael’s attitude. Now this sounds more of an order, and _end of discussion_ kind of clipped tone.

“But—”

“No.”

“Now you’re just being a pain—“

“You were right. All along. Teaching should be inspirational within the rules. I broke down any individuality for the sake of the very same rules I threw away myself. No, Lucifer. It really isn’t for me. I wasn’t made to be a teacher.”

Lucifer has so many answers to that he rather doesn’t even say anything.

As they walk on, the light drizzle turns their clothes heavy. Where Lucifer’s shirts are hard, frozen on his body, Michael is soaked through. He grinds his teeth together just that they wouldn’t chatter.

With a regretful heart Lucifer turns to his brother and stops him in his track. Gently he puts his hands on Michael’s shoulders and with his thumbs he angles his head so that they are looking eye to eye.

The words he is about to say are scorching his tongue.

“You didn’t teach Raphael how to be cold and bitter. You didn’t teach Gabriel how not to take sides and how to run away from his family. You didn’t teach any of us how to rebel and fall. What you taught us, _all of us_ , was loyalty, devotion and that we are worthy. You made us worthy, Michael.”

“Sweet words from the Serpent’s mouth.”

Lucifer doesn’t take the bait. Not when the sharp, sour edge only comes from misplaced self-worth.

“I also said miracles don't come from God.”

“They really don’t.”

“Then let them come from the Devil.”

 


	17. Mighty and Strong

By the next morning Michael shook off the remaining wisps of fog from his mind, put all doubts in the corner of a shelf and promptly forgot about them.

He doesn’t cut back on the amount of empty wine bottles that gather by the end of the week, but the bitterness ebb with each day. There are still fever roses burning on his cheeks but the dark circles have at least paled to even shadows. He is going out, working and twice a week keeping an eye on that Raphael-like colleague’s little sister. When Lucifer learns about this he rubs it in Michael’s face for a good while. The stretch of a smirk is an amazing change after all the frowns that draw deep creases and bed-sores on his forehead.

It seems to be an acceptable middle ground.

Lucifer, too, is searching for his own goals. Although his heart is always heavy and his mind always wanders back, wondering how much time they have.

_Just a little more time._ He needs just a little more.

Lucifer travels round Earth and always returns covered in ash and blood, stinking of gore and sulphur and malicious winds but with empty hands.

No matter what, he doesn’t seem to get closer to find a cure to his brother’s grace burning out. He is really tempted to rush the Pearly Gates, alone if he so must, claw his ways into the vaults of Heaven and spell out Metatron’s scribbles. God must have had something hinted! There used to be a time when their cruel, capricious Father wanted to preserve their kin—

A gush of wind sweeps the length of the street and leaves needles of ice dripping from gutters and fences.

Some drop to the ground with the dull imitation of crystal lustres breaking into diamond dust as Michael slams the door shut.

“I can’t!” he exclaims upon entering.

“Oh my,” Lucifer drawls as he leisurely strolls into the hall. “What’s gotten you so worked up I—“

“Don’t.” Michael warns, struggling with one cuff of his jacket.

“Can’t I even inquire—“

“No! Shut up!”

“But—“

“Just shut up!” Michael snaps, his voice grating, too loud in the drawn heavy air of the house. “Shut up, don’t talk to me. Don’t. Talk. To me!”

Lucifer watches with slightly rounded eyes, arms crossed peevishly over his chest. Michael curses under his breath, disgruntled and so unfocused.

“Michael,” he tries again, but his own tone isn’t gentle enough for his brother to hear.

“I can’t. I _can’t_ do this! I can’t go through holding onto my grace, sorry.”

Lucifer’s throat sizes up, but even as he tries to push some sound through that thin crack the other’s eyes flash at him. Instead of blazing fire they are dark. Powerful and terrifying beyond words.

But immediately, as if stung, Michael turns his gaze away. He throws his jacket on the ground and his hands up in the air.

“No. I—I need a bath.” His shoulders sag, a hand comes to rub down his face. “I just need a bath. I feel sick, and dirty. Yes. Just leave me alone.”

And with that Michael leaves Lucifer stunned in the lobby.

It takes him a while to return to his senses. Even then he can grab hold of his thoughts only when he hears the distant sloshing of Michael slipping into the bathtub. Only then can he separate the piercing hot white of fury and the malicious blood red of panic crushing every bourn of his being.

 

 

Almost shyly, Lucifer peeks into the bathroom.

The air is heavy with heat-haze. Despite the distance his grace keeps from the vessel Lucifer can feel the vapour laying over his skin in thick beads and his lungs fill with water. He nearly turns on his heels and leaves. Instead, though, he steps inside the compound of sweating walls and closes the door behind himself.

Michael lies in the bathtub as outstretched as he could be. Only the very peek of his shoulders and knees form golden islands over the steaming water.

“Don’t look so frightened,” Michael says softly.

His voice resonates deep in Lucifer’s grace – even deeper than his anger boils. It is the same tone, the same words he comforted his little brother with the first time he was met with the vast expanse of eternity.

“I still have my grace.” A weary, long sigh stirs the clouds of warm mist. “Well. What’s left of it anyways.”

“You’re going to have a heatstroke,” Lucifer responds breathlessly. He tells himself it is only the heat sweeping into his eye-sockets that makes them prickle warm and wet.

Michael heaves in another sigh; his head rolls on the folded towel so that now he’s blinking up at his brother.

“I’m not entirely sure we’re ready for this conversation.”

“Didn’t you always preach straightforwardness?”

“Who’s ever followed that?”

Lucifer shrugs one shoulder in a helpless motion. He sinks to perch on the edge of the tub; feverish eyes follow all his moves.

“This is not good for you, Michael,” he says, and with the very tip of his fingers he can brush the black wayward strands curling in the elder’s forehead. He cannot tell if they are slick with water or sweat.

“It’s a human body. What do you care.”

“It pains you.”

“And when my grace pains me?!”

“It hurts me too, trust me, brother, but it’ll fade—“

“Does your heart want to beat out of your chest? Do you lose your breath because of the burn of a thousand suns inside your lungs? Do you feel like belching fire? Because I do!”

“If you could retain more of your grace—!”

“But I _can’t_! It’s more pain than it’s worth it, I could barely swallow back _this_ much!”

“You could have died today?!” Lucifer shouts, his voice bouncing back and forth in the bathroom in an ever-fading echo of _could have_ and _today_. He feels panic clutch and squeeze at his heart until he is doubled over. “You could… You could have… Oh, Michael, you could have—“

He doesn’t realize that he is this close to a nervous breakdown until he feels Michael’s hands cradling either side of his face pressing their foreheads together in a soothing manner. Lucifer lets go of the other’s knee, oblivious of the hairline purple brooks springing down the length of Michael’s thigh, and latches onto his brother, clinging to him as if he could melt their bodies together. Wrapped safely around his grace Lucifer could protect him. He has the power to keep them safe—

_Oh, what cruel Father puts his sons through all this torment?_

“Hey,” Michael murmurs into the damp blond spikes. “I don’t really think I’m dying.”

As if burnt, Lucifer pulls away from the comforting hands. He stares at his brother in horror.

“I’m not a stupid fledgling, Michael, of course you are dying! Your grace! It’s barely bigger than an eyeball!”

“But I’m no less myself.” There gleams some infatuated light in the green eyes that makes Lucifer narrow his own in suspicion. “See? We know what happens to a human soul after it is reaped, but as for what happens to our kin, Lucifer, that is as great mystery as death to a non-believer. Those few who have ripped their grace in rebellion, they could still carry on living being themselves. Maybe—Maybe I could too…”

Lucifer scoffs. His eyes glint cold.

“Do you seriously believe such fairytale? You think you have served Him well to gain a soul when your grace burns out?”

“I _did_ serve Him good.”

“Wake up Michael. God is a petty, selfish puppet master who swipes the sinners under the rug before having his blind loyal lapdogs like you stomp on them.”

“Watch your tone,” Michael hisses, but Lucifer only laughs in his face.

“You fucked me, dear Michael. How great sin do you think it is?”

“Maybe it’s for the best.” His tone is flat, defensive under the layers of steal and heavy armour, Lucifer knows. “In Hell you could maybe drop by and visit sometimes.”

In one sudden burst the temperature drops in the room. The air freezes and beads of ice draw tiny scars on their faces.

“Don’t you dare even think about it!” Lucifer snarls. “It’s ridiculous! You should be wisest of us all and look who’s the most naïve of a child?!”

“So you’d rather I died than entertain a thought of me with a soul?”

Michael’s form slowly starts to shiver in the ever-clearing opalesque water. Whether it’s the cold or his temper is hard to tell.

“Because you _wouldn’t_! Dad won’t love you more just if you were _human_.”

Purple lips turn into a firm, knife-thin line. With black flames dancing in his gaze Michael stands and even before he answers he wraps himself up in a white towel.

“So that’s where we’re circulating back. Over and over again.”

Lucifer scowls at his tense back.

“I devote everything I have _to you_. Anything, as long as I live, my last breath, the last beat of my heart! I’m willing to go back to Hell for you and you—! For you your hatred is more important.”

“Don’t play the martyr,” Lucifer sneers. “You only want some time to help the Host. You could care little about me.”

“I burnt my wings into the bars of the Cage so that _you_ could get out! I was ready to die just to free you. I tore my grace open _for you_! Please, Lucifer, enlighten me. Where do I not care for you?!”

They glare at each other in strained silence, but as Lucifer’s lips remain frozen Michael scoffs silently. He sets his jaw and turns away.

From the door he turns back to level the blond with a cold look.

“You’ll have to kill me soon then. If you want to forego me turning into a despicable human.”

It takes a small eternity for Lucifer to fight the pull of the black hole that just opened in the pit of his stomach. When he finally finds his way out of the bathroom, Michael has already nearly reached the stairs. He is marching, like a crusader to the Holy Land.

 "Michael, Michael, please wait!" Lucifer grabs Michael by the shoulder, spins him around.

As his back hits the wall he refuses to meet Lucifer's begging eyes, so the Fallen reaches under his chin to lift it up. What he finds there is old, almost burnt-out grim determination that only made one's mouth taste bitter.

"Michael, please be angry," he begs softly. "I need you to be angry. To fight for it. For your grace, to cling to it, because—because I can't—I can't watch you turn human. You can't. Don't make me—“ He cannot continue. Words fail him.

That is the moment when Michael lifts his gaze. Finally he doesn’t look past Lucifer as he says, "It’s not like you could hate me any more."

The mighty clap of thunder rings in Lucifer’s ear at those words.

He is totally broken and wants nothing but to prove that what he feels for his big brother cannot be wrapped up in such a weak word as _love_.

He wants to scream that there was no greater torture than having to watch this imperial pillar of flame bow to the ground, mingle with dust, and offer his holy services to a creation of mud; that there is no greater torture than having to watch Michael give up what he is, because he somehow has never learnt how to love himself.

Slowly, and as gently as he can he guides Michael’s head until he can lean down to kiss him. He pours all his unnameable love, his devotion and confusion, adoration and worship in the lingering brush of lips. His grace is trembling, a tiny leaf in the throes of winter, vulnerable but he must show how much he cares.

Whenever Michael tries to incline his head, to swipe his tongue along Lucifer’s lips and then surge forward to deepen the kiss he pulls back. The kiss is only soft lips on soft lips. The softest and most thrillant they have ever touched.

When they break away Lucifer’s own gaze is darkened but the blue of his eyes still sparkle wildly.

Just a breath from him Michael is flushed, trembling, but not from the cold. He rests his head back against the wall, air quivering on his lips. There is dark fire and embarrassment in his eyes as he looks at Lucifer from underneath his thick lashes.

Only when the Morning Star’s gentle hand starts its wandering down the warm body, tracing the lines of his strong chest, curiously circling around one erect nipple then following a white ray of the burst star along the quivering stomach muscles to the sharp cut of his pelvic bone does he realize what he is doing to Michael. He presses closer, dips his head for his nose to brush the length of the other’s neck.

The breathless panting and soft moan floods his ear from this close, and he cannot help a smug smile.

Lucifer skids the tip of his finger along the hardening length of Michael’s cock pressed between their bodies.

His parted lips brush along a tense tendon in the other’s neck until he can nip at the earlobe.

“I thought we could have something innocent,” he murmurs. “And here, your dirty mind just ruined it.”

The warm flesh throbs in his hold.

On the other hand, Michael makes a little choking sound that is more of a sob than anything of pleasure. Worry lacing his features he places a small questioning kiss to the edge of the firmly closed mouth.

“I just,” the lips tremble, “I just… I don’t know how much longer you’d touch me. How much longer you’d want to touch me. It’s… I can’t help it.”

His vision grows blurred, so Lucifer squeezes his eyes shut as he lets up some of the pressure of his body, takes the sides of his brother’s face in his palms and kisses the warm forehead. He kisses Michael long and tender, the same as he wanted when the world came crashing down around them.

They stand like that for a while, snuggled close but still apart, listening to heartbeats and barely restrained erratic breathing, until Michael takes a sigh to steel himself and break the bubble.

“Could you…” He cradles Lucifer's face in both of his hands, eyes bearing into his, huge and tear-shined. “I would do anything for you. I could cling to my grace—but I can't do it forever.”

When Lucifer tries to interrupt him, his hold gently steers the Morning Star back into silence. “But I’m yours. Always. Whatever and whenever, until there is anything of me, Lucifer, that is all yours to have.”

By this time Michael's voice grew breathless, but his expression is raw with honesty, tears and painful confessions. “All of me is yours.”

Lucifer tries again to turn his head away. He cannot.  He cannot think of how little he might be king of this most beautiful domain he calls his brother. But Michael turns his sparkling gaze back on his ethereal face. And, to remind him of their present situation, almost shyly, Michael grinds his hips into Lucifer's hold.

“Could you take me?” he whispers. Voice only a hot breath against his lips, but the weight of his admission makes Lucifer shiver. “Claim me, for you too to remember?”

It takes a while until Lucifer can press out the words through a tear-stained grin. “You sentimental idiot,” he says, but thoroughly kisses away the forming frown.

While his cool palms make their way up and down Michael’s side again he hints kisses to every pale shadow of a crease on that regal forehead, the lines on either side of the firm mouth and the shadowy circles under the gem-like eyes. He keeps caressing and kissing until Michael whimpers in his mouth, desperately sucking on his tongue when it finally pushed past the teasing swipes on burning lips.

Soon, the elder grows impatient, hands roaming the wide expanse of Lucifer’s shoulders.

He grabs one hand, and lacing their fingers together he presses Michael back against the wall, just as his fingers close around Michael’s length. The moan tearing its way, surprised and debauched, in the place of an irritated growl is purely divine.

It takes no time to stroke him to full hardness. By that time he has grown wild, hips chanting up in need and mouth hot and eager, and if Lucifer tries to pull away in teasing Michael simply latches on to another patch of stubble covered skin. He doesn’t care! He simply needs the contact, that he is not alone, he is not repelling – and how could Lucifer deny him then?

Against his cheek Michael whimpers little pleas of “Lucifer, Lucifer please, please, Lucifer,” in a never-ending prayer.

A wisp of anxiety curls in his chest. The last time they fucked and he took Michael’s cock it hurt, it hurt bad but he couldn’t care less because holy golden flames licked all the pain away, but whenever _he_ tries his healing grace is rejected and it seems to pain his brother even more. He doesn’t want to hurt him, but what can he do when moans of _please_ drive him crazy?

His fingers could be like ice melting slick in a warm palm, yet he ghosts the tips of them against the burning lips.

With a burst of desire Michael opens up greedily, sucking the cold fingers into his mouth and as his tongue swirls around the digits coating them in spit he moans. At the sinful sound Lucifer can’t help but echo it in his throat. His own pants grew maddeningly confining.

When he is sure that if Michael sucked on his fingers a second longer he would throw any caution and gentle ideas to the wind, and (no matter how repulsing he found these human desires) he would simply fuck Michael so hard they would break the wall Lucifer hoists one thigh around his hip for better access and slowly pushes one digit up to the first knuckle into the suffocating heat.

The breath hitches in Michael’s throat. Lucifer stops immediately.

“Did I hurt you?” he asks searching for the green gaze.

He watches as Michael leans his head back against the wall, his throat working around words and air.

“No, no,” he gasps. “Not at all.”

“But—“

In an effective way to cut his protest short Michael clenches down around Lucifer’s finger. “I’m good. Keep going!”

And so Lucifer does. Soon enough Michael starts to complain again, demanding that Lucifer quickened up his pace. “You never cared… You won’t break me damnit! I’m good. I’m ready! Ah, Lucifer, please!”

He is going crazy with need to the point where he no longer can shut his mouth around begging.

Lucifer curls a smile, drops his head to suck a mark into the chain from shoulder to ear and doesn’t pick up the speed of his prepping. Not until he has three fingers scissoring and prodding around for that spot that finally makes Michael’s remaining grace burst and the whole corridor is ringing with the archangel’s cry.

It is a pent up minute until Lucifer undoes his jeans, hoists the other thigh around his hip as well and finally, _finally_ , pushes into the velvety warmth. Slowly he slides in, then buried to the base, he stops and just listens. Their heavy breathing echo among stars, together they quiver in the eye of galactic storms.

Lucifer pulls out and thrusts back, same pace, same depth as before. He loves the sound that shakes Michael’s chest.

He keeps to such thrusts, long and deep, soaking up the moans, the flush high on the chiselled cheekbones, the darkened gaze, and the golden rust fluttering on lips and eyelashes alike.

Overtaken by the beauty of his brother he leans over to kiss him. Everywhere, and anywhere he can reach: his hair, the memory of ebony locks sprinkled with rubies so vivid, his ears that grew so deaf to his pleadings, the eyelids that hid flaming emeralds, the mouth that used to claim to love him with adoration, the jaw that set and locked that mouth when he should have taken his beloved’s side, the neck that was surrounded by heavy golden chains and seals, the shoulders that still carry the weight of the world, and the heart that took one fatal wound in hopes of redemption.

Michael rides his movements in perfect harmony with him. The frantic desire, the hunger has receded (or maybe were partially satisfied?), and now he just leans back against the wall, trusting Lucifer in holding him up, and just enjoys it.

He smiles dazedly when Lucifer once emerges from soaking his gospel into Michael’s skin. There is the Golden Apple of Everything in his eyes, and still he looks at the Morning Star as if he was the most precious thing he could ever dream up in this whole wide world.

 

Trembling flesh covered in wet pleas of _I need you, Don’t leave me, I need you_ they slowly climb to the top of the world. When they take their fall, enveloped and blinded by pleasure, the corridor flashes with gold and white, and ice glimmers on the stairs’ railing.

 

Michael's skin tastes salty, with the deeply underlying sense of copper from impending mortality, earth and a spark of holy fire. Lucifer chases that light taste with a shy flicker of his tongue. It elicits a little shiver from the other. He unceremoniously tries to push the Morning Star away if only just to gain an inch more space for his still rapidly expanding and collapsing chest. Futile, all of his attempts are. After all it is Lucifer keeping him upright, legs still loosely looped around his hips. There certainly are red palmmarks on his thighs and ass.

“I love you, Lucifer.”

Lucifer's head jerks up. He stares at Michael with rounded eyes.

“I love you more than anything,” Michael affirms. “You know this, yes?”

“No, you don't.” He hides his face back in the column of his brother’s neck. No. He doesn't.

“Let me know what I feel. Let me name it.”

Lucifer shakes his head 'no'. No, the last time Michael claimed to love him, all went up in flames.

“Promise me. Promise me that you'll take the pain a little longer. Promise me you won't leave me. Promise you won't make me hate you more.”

Michael shifts, and automatically, afraid that he just wants to make another run from such selfish behaviour, Lucifer tightens his hold. But Michael only cups his cheeks in both hands, and guides the crystal eyes to look at him.

“I promise that I'll protect you. And I'll hold on to my grace as long as I can.”

In return Lucifer gives him a small, watery smile.

“Good,” Michael nods. Then, after a short pause he starts squirming again. “Now put me down before my legs fall asleep entirely.”

“Or I could just take you wherever,” Lucifer counters. But the end of his jibe, of how Michael weighs nothing remains stuck in his throat.

He rolls his eyes, fondly pecks the blond on the temple and slips to the ground all the same.

Lucifer isn’t sure how it happened, but after a moment of hesitation he is trailing after his big brother’s slightly limping form into the bedroom, and then under some spell he even crawls into bed with him. Michael snuggles into the crook of his shoulder.

The little satisfied sigh makes his chest tighten and burn.

“Wake me up in an hour.”

“Why?”

His fingers find their way among the black, matted hair on their own accord.

“If I sleep too much now, I can’t sleep at night,” Michael mumbles. “I don’t like staying up all night.” His hand blindly searches for Lucifer’s hanging loosely just over his waist. The fingers he laces together with the Morning Star’s cool ones are slightly shaking. It only recedes when he gently squeezes back in reaffirmation. He is there. This afternoon won’t be dark.

No night should be dark. If only Michael wasn’t so proud of his own!

 

He dreams of snow-covered hills, sparkling starlight going on forever and ever. Then the edge of the horizon starts smouldering, soft smoke billows in the moon’s solemn face. Behind the peeks the skyline turns grey until the first sunrays tear up the fabric of the night and spill blood all over the plane turning the winter scenery into chaos and horror.

By noon it is all parched, ash and smoking burnt graveyard.

He dreams about shredding his wings. Feather by feather, each a new bead of blinding pain and bleeding stardust.

In front of him Michael is watching; an immobile marble statue with screaming eyes. This time he cannot stop Lucifer’s maddening itch like he did when they were little and showed how to groom a wing properly.

Now the very same wings that used to sing under Michael’s careful, adoring hands are burning into his back, fallen feather by fallen feather covering his shoulders and arms in angry frost.

When he wakes his eyes are swimming with tears. They spill and wet his pillow.

Right in his arms Michael is sleeping, sound and peaceful.

The angry markings of the elder’s sacrifice should instil horror in Lucifer’s heart. Instead, he is filled with a strange sense of serenity. Those scars ever-carved into his memory remain, prickling, now a part of his own grace as well. Everything is more bearable if they can share the burden and pain.

With the ache still fluttering in his heart Lucifer blinks the sleep out of his eyes. The shadows in the room took up a violet hue. He probably let Michael sleep in a bit.

“Michael,” he calls gently.

“Mnph.”

Lucifer grins when his big brother tries to shrug off the kiss he planted on his shoulder. He teasingly hints a couple more along the bruises he left up to the other’s ear.

“You told me to wake you up.”

“… ‘know,” Michael groans. He tries to swat Lucifer away. “Y’re cold.”

The Morning Star doesn’t need to be told twice. In a second his _cold_ fingers are all over Michael, teasing, tickling, prodding at his side, his warm stomach, the sensitive line where his thigh meets his ass, the inside of his elbow, until Michael is squirming so violently if Lucifer doesn’t wrap a secure arm around his middle in a blink he would fall off the bed.

“I hate you,” Michael pants.

Just as he turns to glare at Lucifer his further protests are smothered in a kiss.

“I thought you loved me,” the blond smirks when he pulls back to let the other breathe.

He settles back against the headboard, and after he grew bored of his glower having no effect Michael gives up and snuggles into his side.

“What happened this afternoon?” Lucifer asks casually.

Michael doesn’t even tense up, he only sighs. “I had an episode at work. It… wasn’t nice.”

Lucifer swallows his nerves down. In a soothing manner he buries his fingers in the elder’s hair.

“Does this mean you also got fired?”

“No. I just got sent home. They’ll probably keep an eye on me though. In case I go breaking the plates and collapse right in front of the costumers. Not really good for business, you see.” The curses Lucifer murmurs Michael only wave off. “It wasn’t that bad. It just hurt. I was lucky they didn’t call the ambulance. Would have been difficult to explain how it’s not epilepsy, I’m just coughing up my grace.”

“ _Just_.”

“I promised you, didn’t I?” Michael shoots back sharply.

His silence is an unsaid _sorry_.

“So you aren’t looking for another job?” Lucifer asks cautiously. “One that fits your mission of helping our little fallen family?”

Michael squints up at him in a mixture of suspicion, dawning hope and irritation.

“How about you try the police?”

Lucifer doesn’t have the time to explain how even though it isn’t that different from serving in the army, but this way it isn’t so far from Michael’s actual experiences, and how he has been their patron saint for a good couple of centuries either way, because as soon as the very same thoughts flash through his brother’s mind Lucifer is knocked back against the headboard and Michael is kissing him with fervour, pouring the sweet taste of gratitude into his mouth.

 


	18. Give me a sign

Lucifer's genius idea brings forth what he likes to call a miracle. _Miracle from the Devil_. He really likes the sound of it.

Michael’s expression, washed over by the purest joy and excitement when he returns from the police station, beaming like he used to upon returning from victorious battles just a step away from reporting his success to Father, is worth everything.

"They'll let me take the entrance exam like everyone else," he declares even before he crosses the threshold. "If I pass the personality examination they'd accept me to the academy and then I could become a policeman!"

Apparently Michael didn’t start a record after their little escapade at the church in the beginning of their post-Apocalypse life.

"That's great news I suppose."

Michael doesn't even frown at Lucifer's blank face just dashes down the hall and swipes his little brother up in his arms. Lucifer allows him even a spin, which is utterly ridiculous, but as it ever has been, Michael’s joy is contagious. He cannot keep the straight face any longer; he breaks into a wide and brilliant grin as well.

"Serve and protect, then?"

"You said I was good at that."

“Even if you'll have to take orders from _humans_?"

“Even then."

Lucifer smiles. Michael is good at following orders and he is authority himself there is nothing to be worried about. Especially concerning his advance in position. He will feel useful and that is all that matters. He will fight for it – fight for his life, his grace, this chance of a new goal – and he won't be _just a Sword_ anymore.

Either way there isn't much time to ponder such thoughts because the next second Michael's mouth is on his smothering him in kisses and laughter.

 

From that day on, whenever he isn't at work Michael is hunched over the dinner table, or pacing around the house with his nose buried in notes and books.  He also cuts back on his drinking. It messes with his head and memory. Plus it really wouldn’t look good in his evaluation.

Lucifer follows him around not as much for picking up morsels of knowledge about police protocol but rather for listening to Michael's deep rumbling voice. Also he really loves quizzing Michael at the end of the day. Especially how after they finish he, too, is rewarded for his hard work.

He loves all the nights of content making out sessions after the letters started to swim in front of Michael’s eyes. Those mostly end in cuddling and then sleeping in after lazy, heartfelt kisses, but Lucifer can pretend that he is giving back something from all the care Michael wrapped them up in when they were younger and didn’t even know how much they would miss it one day. This time it is Lucifer wrapping his wings around them like a cocoon of ice keeping the elder’s body heat in and the disturbing sounds of reality out. It is Lucifer playing with his brother’s hair caressing his cheeks with the distant shadow of a tender smile, and it is he who gets to kiss Michael’s brows before his eyes flutter shut heavy with sleep.

It is his claim of selfish desire and of protection burning for the horrors of dreamland to see, and for Michael to remember how he is not alone in this.

This, at least, fills Lucifer with some contentment.

 

Lucifer is sitting in the far corner or the restaurant Michael landed himself a job at. It is quite cosy, the daylight flows through half a wall of windows but still the back of the room remains comfortably dim surrounded by warm shades of brown and cream, yellow light slipping on the wooden tabletops mostly when the little lamps are turned on by dusk. This is his place, his corner, as the afternoon patrons rather bask in the patches of light and leave him to his thoughts.

His cold gaze follows Michael’s form treading among the round tables outside, elegantly slipping through the door and making his way back to the bar to halt for a few exchanged words with Ade? Adele? Lucifer really doesn’t care, and then slid into the kitchen to dispose of the cups and cutlery he collected. Lucifer watches all his moves over steeped fingers and he just cannot help this tightness spreading from the pit of his stomach to his shoulders.

Michael moves with grace, his head held high, regal as always true, but he is somehow still off balance. He leans constantly just a breath to the right, something Lucifer hasn’t realized before. And then he realizes why. It is the missing weight of the sword from his left hip.

A gentle touch on his shoulder snaps him out of his daze. He jerks, ready to strike, but only Michael looks at him with concern.

“I really wouldn’t appreciate if you slaughtered everyone here.”

“What would I do without your bright optimism?” Lucifer smiles briefly, then squints at the tall glass in front of him. “What’s this?”

“Iced coffee.”

“I’m pretty sure I don’t like it.”

Michael tucks the tray under his arm and puts the other hand on his hip.

“You must consume something or I’ll be inclined to kick you out.” He blows some lose strands of hair out of his eye.

“But I don’t like coffee.”

“You can’t _taste_ it.”

“But even its molecules feel bad.”

“It’s mostly ice, cream and cinnamon, don’t be such a petulant child. And you do like ice.”

“Fair point,” Lucifer concedes. He twirls the spoon around in the glass. It gives a clear clinking noise. “It’s not what I ordered though. I’m not paying.”

Michael rolls his eyes. “You didn’t order anything.”

Lucifer sticks his tongue out. The cheeky move earns him a playful whisk to the face, but it is more of an excuse for the long fingers to linger in a tender touch on the side of his cheek before Michael turns away and goes back to work.

This is yet another advantage of this secluded dark corner. Whenever serving him Michael has the chance of some grounding, comforting touches, a brush of hands, a soft smile. Like this both of them could check on the other: if Michael was burning with fever or blue-lipped from the assault of the cold; if Lucifer’s grace was burning sores through his vessel, or if the Morning Star was on the brink of murderous madness.

That last one, sadly, became a rather feasible worry.

Lucifer has serious doubts. He always has concerning others’ decisions, it is a cherished and despised trait of his character, but right now it doesn’t let him be. This doubt has wormed its nasty way into the sweet moments of Michael’s happiness.

Even if Michael found himself a goal in existence it didn’t change the cruel fact that he is dying. No childish hope for a soul could change that. It doesn’t solve anything. No matter what the elder stubbornly claims.

So it is up to Lucifer to find a solution.

It is more urgent than ever, also because he realized way too late the threads of insanity weaving a thick blanket over the clarity of his mind. Sometimes he is afraid the patchwork is complete and soon he will be smothered by it.

The day before he slipped into the world of most dreadful dreams – those that felt horribly real even after Michael gently shook him awake.

Lucifer slammed his brother against the counter, bent back in a painful angle. He felt his Adam’s apple bob helplessly under the press of his forearm as he fought for air, but Lucifer only let him go when his eyes were rolling back into his skull.

In spite of the laws of physics Michael’s fire seemed to glow brighter when it was barred from oxygen – it was the only way to know that faint glow was still his brother trapped in that dark cavern of flesh and bone.

Lucifer was furious. He lashed out on Michael. He accused him of planning suicide again. He accused that Michael, once bright and respected Governor of Heaven, Keeper of the Secret Vaults, knew exactly how his grace could be saved. He just simply didn’t want to tell Lucifer.

Then and there, pushed to the ground, hunched and gasping, defeated but unbroken, proud in his fall Michael looked up at Lucifer with such burning hatred in his eyes only one could keep bottled up who also held the greatest and deepest of love for the same person.

When he blinked his eyes open, for a long while he couldn’t decide if he was awake or dreaming for real. Michael’s warm hand on his forearm, the grounding sorrowful love and _knowing_ deep in his gaze made it feel all the more aery.

Lucifer is going crazy.

He doesn’t know how long he can teeter on the edge, but one thing he does know for certain: if he loses Michael, _once again_ , the world will weep blood under his reign.

His latest idea is to seek out Michael’s sword. The real one, not the glint-y play thing he must have picked up somewhere not to feel overly exposed.

He is searching for the flame that had parched lands and dried up seas in one swing. He is searching for the sword that is as much molten and hardened grace as the little candle still glimmering in the shell of bones.

That is the solution. He is sure. Michael has turned resembling a shell. There is no way to die or perish away in the Cage, well, except if it is a human vessel already held together by safety pins after being burnt away into oblivion by holy oil, so it is most likely that Michael’s grace isn’t lost but only locked away.  All locks can be opened. If not with key, then they can be picked – tricked into giving way to force.

He has flicked through hundreds of years of memory, but he doesn’t remember Michael pulling his sword. He doesn’t remember seeing it in the Cage—

“Did you just call my girlfriend fat?!”

Lucifer’s head snaps up at the shouting.

Michael just served a couple their drinks, and is now trying his best to glare some manners into the red-faced man who thought it is okay to challenge him like that.

“You asked me about side dishes and—“

“You straight out called her fat! You offered her a salad and that’s it! Do you think she is a rabbit?” The woman across from him tries to put a comforting hand on the man’s arm, but he shakes it off. “Do not try to press some vegan bullshit on us!”

“I didn’t imply—“

“I won’t tolerate this!” the man shouts into the eerie silence of the restaurant. “I want to talk to the manager!”

Without making a sound Lucifer stands from his corner.

“Sir, if you had just allowed me to finish,” Michael answers, calm and collected, but even that makes Lucifer bristle. No one! No one dares to talk to Michael like this! No one ever dared to raise their voice, to belittle the Heavenly Prince like this, and expected to walk away unscathed. And here this vermin just keeps on calling the archangel names!

“I’m not paying!” the man goes on with his tirade. “This is unacceptable! And don’t you try to tell me off, you little shit! You should shut your mouth and serve us! You expect some tips for your pretty face? Well, we aren’t paying a dime! Where the hell is the manager?!”

When Michael tries to speak up again, the uncharacteristic voice of reason and calm, the man picks up his girlfriend’s glass and sloshes the water into the angel’s face.

In the dead silence of the restaurant Lucifer’s voice hisses icy cold, “You swine should be slain and served to the dogs.”

From under his dripping bangs Michael cuts him a warning look. He turns, a hand to Lucifer’s chest, effectively putting up some barrier between his angry brother and the hysteric guest.

“Mind your own fucking business, man!”

“Oh, I do,” Lucifer says.

Glasses and cutlery starts clinking furiously together, the lamps blink and static rings in the air. Lucifer can feel another line of bedsores opening around his eyes, but his fingers at his side are itching to disembowel this pig and feed him his own guts—

“Lucifer! Lucifer, enough!” Michael snarls, barely over the people’s anguished screams at the deafening sound.

Only the Devil is above listening. His eyes are sparkling stars, his teeth sharp and violent, and he is hard set on protecting what is his. He barely registers Michael at his side, the hand slipping from his chest, hopelessly clinging to his arm, but he is only a shadow in the periphery of Lucifer’s view. His aim is right in front of him, a tiny, disrespectful, unworthy little creature who will be dissected and burnt in a matter of seconds—

Next he is snapped back into the still silence of reality with Michael’s arm around his waist, the tray cold and hard bumping his opposite side, and teeth nipping at his lower lip in angry insistence.

In the background the shouts of “He attacked me! Everyone saw this bastard attacked me!” turned into “Fucking fags are everywhere!”

Now the entire place is buzzing like a beehive, more and more joining the first man’s complaints.

Michael pushes Lucifer away.

“I hope you are proud of yourself,” he glowers. “We’ll talk at home.”

Lucifer sets his jaw. He wouldn’t just let this blasphemy slide like this!

“What is this mess?” A woman with storm clouds billowing over her perfectly shaped eyebrows demands as she nears the table. Michael’s friend follows nervously in tow.

“This whole place should burn!”

Before Lucifer could shoot back how he would love to roast this worm over the fires of Hell, Michael fixes him with a glare. “ _Go_.” He orders.

If it wasn’t for the bloodcurdling authority in his voice, Lucifer wouldn’t have obeyed.

 

Lucifer finds it strangely amusing to use the front door when he returns. He still feels the chilling high winds. Their force was only a soft breeze too shy to mingle with the storm of his temper, but not unlike old time’s gentle kisses it is also soothing. So when he opens the door and comes face to face with Michael’s smouldering glare Lucifer has to bite the inside of his lips to bar a smirk from curling sharply.

“Where have you been?!” Michael rips into him immediately. “I told you to wait for me at home!”

“But how, when I don’t have a home?” Lucifer says, and undeterred strolls past his brother sitting on the bottom of the stairs.

Michael pushes himself to his feet and falls in step with Lucifer easily.

“It’s besides distorting words. You ignored me. You openly disrespected my wish!”

“Cut it, will you?” Lucifer doesn’t even cast a glance back over his shoulder as he makes his way through the living room for the back door. “If you’re acting so high and mighty now what was that bowing to the ground with that abortion?!”

Michael grabs hold of Lucifer’s shoulder, but the pull is only strong enough to make his own hand hurt.

“It still doesn’t give you the right to act on my behalf!”

“But picking _human_ means to deal with those cockroaches? You’re turning _weak—“_

Suddenly Lucifer’s body tenses up as if a bolt of electricity had run from his toes to the top of his head. The chill focuses in the middle of his back. Shivers run up and down his shoulder blades before they run into the eye of the storm that is Michael’s fingers pressing into _that_ spot—

All in the matter of one second.

Lucifer gasps and falls over; he barely catches himself on one knee and his hands on the back of the couch. Only when his brother’s fingers pull back from the joint of his wings in the delft of his spine can Lucifer catch his breath. Sweat is beading slowly on his forehead, heat is cruising his frozen veins – he feels like melting.

Meanwhile Michael’s chest is solid warmth lined with his back.

“Thanks to your meddling,” he hisses into Lucifer’s ear, “if that man starts prosecution I’ll be losing all chance at getting into the police. I finally found something I like. Do you enjoy taking even that little comfort from me?”

Lucifer scoffs. “Your misshapen hopes are ridiculous. Act like the archangel you are while you _can_!”

“ _I_ have to meld with this body and suffer through that pain cell by cell. _I_ bleed. _I_ ache. _I_ shave, _I_ bathe, _I_ have to urinate and cater to all the needs of this vessel. _I_ have to fight to keep my grace from burning it to ashes in its departing. So tell me again, Lucifer, what is _your_ problem with the ways _I_ choose?”

“You are mine,” Lucifer presses out.

“No one has given you authority over me. You have my devotion but you don’t _own_ me.” Michael tells him. His voice rings crystal clear, through haze and thawing Arctic, and Lucifer has to stifle a moan. “I might be losing power, I might burn duller, I might have gone deaf, but I still know you best. _You_ are mine to care for.”

“And you would, wouldn’t you?” Lucifer laughs breathlessly. “Show my place, keep me on a leash. You’d take such _good_ care of me.”

To accent what he truly means Lucifer presses back into Michael’s hot body, rubbing the curve of his ass to the other’s groin, even just to remind him how perfectly even their vessels had been carved for each other. They match, they fit, and when he feels the first sparks of grace flicker on his skin, Lucifer melts away with a sinful mewl.

Michael might be angry, far in the distance cities could collapse to be on the headlines of newspapers for a few fleeting days, but what it brings to life in Lucifer is far more earth-shuddering. All that frustration finally has a new way to manifest without blood and tears, and what else could Lucifer ask for than bursts and bursts of flame licking blisters along his skin to soak their warmth into his core and pull a sinful moan from his lips.

To teach him a lesson about respecting boundaries, wishes, _orders_ Michael fucks Lucifer pressed firmly against the smothering leather where all he can do is melt under all the unleashed anger and writhe in bliss soaking up all the power, all that precious, blood-stained attention directed on his punishment that made his grace sing with masochistic joy.

 

Still panting Michael leans his forehead against Lucifer’s bare shoulder. He didn’t even realize when the fabric had been torn from that side of his body. Frankly he doesn’t care. Their skins are clammy, sticking together with sweat, both of them cooling. For a while they just breathe together, chest to back. Then Michael stirs. Instead of the steady pressure of his head it becomes kisses hinted along the line of the blond’s shoulder, lapping apologetically at the bitemark there.

The mouth is light and warm, like a little bird unable to decide which spot it prefers to settle.

“I’m not sorry,” Michael murmurs kissing up Lucifer’s neck. Reaching below his ear he adds, “It’s not like you could hate me any more whatever I do.”

A shiver crosses Lucifer’s form. It feels like the faint echo of colliding with the Earth at the end of his Fall. It is only his brother’s arm instinctively tightening around his middle, pulling him back to the steadily calming beat of that flaming ruby heart that steadies him.

Michael has made his way back, lips brushing that point where collar bone joins into the shoulder when Lucifer can finally form words.

“I can,” he says softly, “And I will. I will hate you and never forgive you if you leave me.”

“I promised, Luca. I promised I won’t leave you.”

“But you still—You, you don’t want to stop it. You’ll die.”

Michael sighs, in a painfully patronizing, big brotherly way. “At some point Death reaps everyone.”

“Not us!”

“ _Not you_.”

 


	19. Scintilla

On Lucifer’s account Michael got fired. This wasn’t accepted that well by everyone.

Michael wasn’t the problem. He tried to see the silver lining. Authorities weren’t involved, so he still had a chance at getting into the police. Now at least he had even more time to prepare for the entrance exam.

This was all the outrageously childish reasoning Lucifer could take. Michael was so deep in denial about his impending death, so detached from reality that he could not, and should not be allowed to make decisions whether he wanted Lucifer to search for a cure for his blinking out grace.

Their roles have been reversed and he is more than fine with it.

He waits until Michael finally falls asleep over his notes, the crease over his nose still deep and troubled from the headache, and kissing his brother on the forehead he takes off.

He wastes a couple of hours circling over various states from Minnesota to South Dakota before logic drives him back to the brink of madness and to Stull cemetery.

Michael would have been foolish to arrive to their great final battle, turning his offering of walking off the chessboard down all without his Sword. He might have dropped it before the black hole swallowed them to the deepest pit of Hell.

A faint tug at the back of his mind halts his steps as he wades among the broken headstones.

_Lucifer_.

He inhales deeply, his chest expanding. His eyes flutter shut.

_Where are you…?_ Michael must have just woken up. From a nightmare, from fever, maybe from feeling lonely in his bed. And the idiot is praying.

_It’s not funny. You should at least leave some note…_ Just as Lucifer wants to shake off the spell Michael adds, so silent but firm that feels like the world has just settled over his chest. _I worry, Lucifer._

What, _what_ do you worry about? Lucifer wants to snap back. What he should be worried about is himself, not about where Lucifer goes!  He has made his agenda clear as day, what does Michael expect? That he would raise an army? Try and fight him?!

A distant, mighty voice rumbles through his mind, _Michael could still floor you._

Yes. Michael could. Michael did.

_Not you_. These words alone could strike Lucifer in the dirt anytime, and if they left Michael’s lips one more time he would break down, no doubt. But this doesn’t mean he should stop.

He will prove Michael wrong. He will save this impossibly proud and noble brother of his no matter what. If he has to he would pry his hidden grace out of the deepest corner of his heart as humans force a shell to give up its pearl.

Nothing, no other angel, no human, no demon, not even God or Michael himself could make Lucifer lose his brother again.

For the third time he circles back to the burnt field where he nearly crashed Dean Winchester’s skull against his precious car. With an irritated twitch of his brow he realizes he is standing in the exact same spot where his concentration slipped in a second of roaring jealousy. He is standing right where Sam took the reins and pulled all three of them into damnation…

Just as he spreads his fingers over the sick ground to freeze it to the very core of the Earth something catches his eye. It is a metallic glint to his left at the root of one broken tombstone.

Lucifer crouches down, but just before he could pick the piece up, with a hiss, the steel turns smouldering white and around it the grey blades of grass catch fire. First it is just a thin strip of smoke, but soon pale little flames are running in every direction devouring all the death around them.

He sits back on his heel. There is no doubt. This is one piece of Michael’s sword. Glancing around with new hope rising, he wonders where the rest could lay about.

“You won’t find it here.”

Lucifer’s head snaps up at the deep voice. He squints at the newcomer. There is… _something_ highly familiar about this angel.

Maybe the way the tension-heavy air gathers close around him like thick armour. Or the way fear makes his maimed wings shiver. His feet might root deep into the ground, but they would never reach as deep as they did once in front of the Gate of Eden.

“This can’t be,” the words rip off the angel’s mouth like a wounded bird. “No. No. You aren’t real. You aren’t _here_.”

_How could you? I trusted you. We trusted you. Woe is me, for I trusted the Serpent!_

Lucifer’s mouth pulls into a sneer. “Gadreel,” he purrs. “Sweet, sweet Gadreel.”

Gadreel’s hands are trembling by his sides. He is fighting to force an expression of dispatched arrogance back on his features.

“You cannot be here,” his voice is far less panicked now.

Lucifer tilts his head slightly to the side, amused. Michael would be proud of his little soldier, he thinks.

“Why, where else should I be?” he asks innocently.

Now, Gadreel does brace himself. The Guardian’s shoulders are square, his jaw a tight line, eyebrow cocked condescendingly.

Lucifer pulls himself to his full height. He has already sneaked through the cracks of these gates. No one’s above falling.

“Who were you expecting to meet here, God’s Most Faithful?”

Gadreel’s nose wrinkles. “Apparently you.”

“Not by the looks of it.”

The ex-gatekeeper stares back at him calmly apart from the deep shivering of his grace and soon even his hands hang lose by his sides.

“I came with a message,” he declares not taking the bait.

_All these petty human pains_ , miles away Michael groans resigned. _I can deal with my wing cut through the bone, but a headache is driving me crazy._

Lucifer seals his lips shut tightly and inclines his head.

Gadreel, on his part, looks dubious for a second but then he takes a deep breath and starts: “Since it’s always about you two, we’ll show some generosity. Tit for that if you like. We have what you’re looking for like a mad man, and also a favour to ask. Which you’ll be happy to accept, no doubt. Meeting at the Convent, tomorrow evening. No tricks, unlike the last time.”

_I—I think I’ll just try and go back to sleep. Ah, damn it, I promised no more pills. It’s on you, Lucifer._

“Who is this _we_?” Lucifer asks with a suspicious squint.

“I’m not allowed to tell.”

“Why should I trust you then?”

Gadreel scoffs, his features scrunched up in deep disdain. “Because _you_ are all about trust.”

The Devil watches with delight as colour suddenly drains from Gadreel’s face. His hands are balled up again, all muscles drawn tense like a bow about to snap. All _this_ because of a knife-thin smile that doesn’t even show teeth and leaves the pair of blue eyes cold as the eternity of space.

“I _am_ indeed about trust.” Lucifer says, slowly getting round to the other angel. “And the last one to trick me is the very same person you used as a vessel. That’s right, Gadreel. I can tell that you took _my_ vessel, and even more so that you were thrown out. So I assume, you either did something horrible, or you took him against his consent. Which one was it, hm, Gadreel?” he raises his eyebrows in an expression of pitying sympathy.

“It was a means to the end!”

“Sure. You never want anyone to get hurt. You are so desperate and naïve, dear Gatekeeper.”

“You took that naivety from me. You took that from all of us.”

“Always blaming others,” Lucifer sighs, “when it’s only you who’s so yielding.” Now he is circling so close to Gadreel he can feel the earth trembling from the repressed shivers. “You all die to follow someone. So, who is it? Another highly ambitious of our brothers? Or maybe the new rebels with the Winchesters? Humans, Gadreel. They are the greatest evil, they cannot be trusted. Not at all. Look where they left us…”

“I just want to redeem myself!” Gadreel snaps. His outburst brings Lucifer to a halt, only a few inches in front of him. “Why not blame the real monster here? I trusted you, I respected you, we all did, and we still stand the gaff. You and—“ His eyes round. “Michael. It’s always you and Michael!”

Gadreel quickly starts backing away. His once calm eyes seem like a restrained storm.

“Everything. Everything bad that’s happened is all because the two of you. _It’s always you two_. You tricked me, and Michael locked me up! You have _none_ of my sympathy! Whatever it is, I’m not helping. You won’t have another word from me!”

The angel resembles more and more of the gatekeeper Lucifer visited the first time, then in the nest of his big brother’s wings. He bore the sword of Heaven in hand, frightening as all warriors are, but then it was all concealed with the respectful bow in front of the archangels. Now all that gentleness that grew throughout Lucifer’s visits has been torn to shreds. It is again only some dusty armour that kept the beast at bay. Or maybe just the corner of the universe he is now hold captive against.

There is no way he could outrun Lucifer. Not with barely a handful of feathers trembling on his wings. Not with the Devil’s fingers wrapped around his throat, nails piercing the thin layers of skin. He can scent the blood pooling in the small wounds.

“Careful there. Remember, don’t make oaths you cannot keep,” Lucifer says, his words freezing on Gadreel’s face. “Who sent you?”

Gadreel would spit him square in the face. It is all written in his eyes, but he holds himself better than that.

Lucifer hisses like the snake he once wore as a disguise. He forces his grace to fester in his fingertips, pushing the tendrils under the other angel’s skin until he can feel the muscles spasm. However, Gadreel only stares back at him with defiance.

“Who knows that I and Michael are back?”

_I—I hope you are okay. I wish you were okay, Lucifer. Please, come back soon._

“Who thinks to know what I’m looking for?”

Now Gadreel’s grace is blazing white-blue in his eyes and behind his teeth. He is clawing at Lucifer’s wrist in vain, but remains true to his word.

The archangel is vivid with anger. He usually wouldn’t refrain to such means, but he is running out of time. And if he cannot get what he wants to know by clever words, then so be it. Michael has done it, what has Lucifer to lose? A vicious smile curls his lips into a snarl. He has earned the title of Satan already after all. One slash, steal the grace and bend it to the supernova of his will…

_You won’t like it but uh… I just found another bottle of wine. See? This is how it feels when you’re jugging all that demon blood down. Except you taste disgusting afterwards. It’s just grape juice. Who would have thought Noah really did know something._

“Your loyalty is misplaced, Gadreel. You believe you, the new Messenger, will be protected? That there is some rule for that? You might not have heard what happened to your foregoer.”

Gadreel’s throat is working under the pressure of the icy palm. But even if it were forming words Lucifer would silence them right where they are crafted.

_Just. Please, Lucifer. Don’t hurt anyone._

He blinks, like he was waking from a slumber.

There is someone a step ahead of him. Maybe they just found the sword and picked it up in hopes of its power serving their selfish desires. Maybe they found and recognized Michael’s sigil and thought it could authorize them to rule Heaven. Or maybe they really do have no idea and they were just waiting for someone to come a-looking for the same thing. It’s just a trade. It will be a simple trade. A favour for the sword.

At least Lucifer must have his priorities sorted, damn it!

What does he have to fear? If it is not to his liking he can kill the poor bastard for their hubris. Anything for Michael to be himself again.

Slowly he uncurls the claws of his grace from Gadreel’s. The lightning glow fades, and soon it is the defiant, exhausted angel trying to put some heat in his glare staring back at Lucifer.

“You might know what imprisonment feels like,” he says as he sets Gadreel on his feet. “But keep in mind, if I don’t get what I want, Heaven’s prison bars won’t be there to keep you from me.”

 

 

 “This is awful,” is what Michael greets him with as he tucks his wings away. Or maybe it isn’t really directed at him. Talking to oneself is actually pretty normal way of coping with the silence ripping your skull apart.

Lucifer takes in the sight in front of him. “You’re drunk,” he notes dryly. Again.

Michael scoffs. His gaze flutters to his brother. Their glint is dull, alcohol fog has settled heavy over the sea-green of his eyes.

“If I was,” he says, words slightly slurred, “I would have switched channels.” He angrily throws the TV remote at the far end of the couch. “Why do I even bother to watch the news?!”

“You are going to deal with those things firsthand soon,” Lucifer says making his way to where Michael lies wrapped up in a blanket. “Better be prepared.”

Michael obediently lifts his head and allows the other to take a seat. Then, as if gravity was weighing down too much on his body he drops back down. A little sigh escapes his chest when Lucifer’s fingers find their usual place in his hair.

“It already feels so personal. So much closer than just watching them, Lucifer.”

He doesn’t answer. Because he really doesn’t know. They are ants under his heels all the same.

“Why do we even care for them? They are just going to kill each other, what do we care when it happens?!”

Involuntarily, Lucifer’s fingers tighten in Michael’s hair. This really isn’t the topic they should discuss. Not now. _Not now_. If that volcano of ice-cold fury erupts it will only all go down in screams and agony.

His gaze, desperately searching for some possible change of topic, lands on the wine bottle at the feet of the couch next to the mess of notes. It has toppled over, but there is no purple stain on the carpet.

“I thought you managed to cut back on the drinking,” he says. “You’re turning into an alcoholic.”

This elicits a bitter chuckle from Michael. “I don’t have enough time for that. Thanks for the reminder.”

“It’s still not the best trait.” _There is. There is time. There will be time for that._

Lucifer definitely prefers the horny-drunk side of his brother to this one.

 


	20. Old and New GOD

“Where. Are. We. Going?”

Lucifer can’t help the tightening of his jaw. He could grind the Himalayas under his teeth.

“I’ve trusted you without question, now it’s your turn, Michael.” He answers sharply.

Michael jerks to a sudden stop. “I have my entrance exams in two days. I won’t go anywhere until you give me an explanation.”

The suspicion, deep and dark as a sudden mid-summer storm cuts so deep in his breast.

He throws his hands wide open. “Where do you think I’d take you? To Hell? You were so ready to be damned just a week ago! You’re giving me this look again and I swear it’s wearing my patience thin.”

Michael takes a step back. The arms crossed over his chest form an impenetrable shield.

“We’ve been going out for _months_ , what is your problem now?”

“Make up your mind, that’s my problem. Tell me where we are going!”

“You never wanted to know before!”

“And you’ve never treated our trips like a question of life or death. Why is this one different?”

“It just _is._ It’s important to me. Michael, just come along.”

“Not until you tell me.”

Lucifer growls. He cannot begin to explain how every second they waste is another step closer to Death. He can count the tiny sparks swirling in Michael’s vessel, one burning in each eye and one flickering in the beating heart. It is only the matter of minutes while he still has a brother; they have no time for arguments. He is going to strike his mysterious little deal, grab the sword and thrust it in Michael’s hand and hope beyond hope that it will work.

Although it never will if his brother is backing away, eying Lucifer as if he was the Adversary.

“This is my call to make, and you are coming along. No more questions, understood?”

After a short pause Michael coldly asks, “So aren’t you coherent enough to go on preaching free will?”

“You never wanted free will!”

For a tense moment Michael only stares back at him with his steely hard gaze. It makes Lucifer shudder. Memories of the seething edge of a black hole simmer in his mind, hungry to tear the reins of his sanity from his hands. Then his brother’s expression flickers. His face grows blank, his visor clicking in place.

_He’s going to war._

Michael uncrosses his arms and reaches both of his hands in Lucifer’s direction.

He surrendered to order.

Lucifer, his head suddenly breaking to the surface over malicious waves of madness, snatches them in his cold palms and pulls Michael closer, holds the hands to his heart. Manic adoration glows on his face.

“Michael,” he says softly. “Michael, please. Trust me. I wouldn’t hurt you. I wouldn’t.”

The older inclines his head.

Suddenly, seeing the strength rippling in the squared shoulders and the gaze turned humbly to the ground, like a whip cracked on a disobedient back, it hits Lucifer where he has witnessed such a sight.

He clasps Michael’s shoulders in his hands and shakes him until he cannot but glance up.

“I won’t! I’d never do that to you! Michael, how could you think that?! How could you think I’d ever _use_ you like He did?!”

His brother doesn’t answer.

“I’m not taking your choice away, Michael. I’m not ordering you. I only ask you trust me. This one last time. I can – I _will_ help you. I’ll save you and all will be right. Like _before_.”

Lucifer can still feel the anger vibrating in the other’s fingertips when he nods, however stubborn and unconvinced, as he clasps his hands around the Morning Star’s biceps.

“I’ll save you, Michael,” he insists.

Before Michael could collect his new budding sense of humanity’s curse of free will and fight back Lucifer holds him to his chest and flaps his massive wings.

They land on the cracked pavement of a street. The day has turned into the early hours of dusk.

Michael staggers and slips out of Lucifer’s crushing embrace. His face is white as milk and the breath shakes on his lips. Lucifer calls out his name, but he just holds up a hand, dismissive and proud. Leaning against a clammy column that once served as the gate he squeezes his eyes shut and tries to catch his breath. As he slowly tucks himself at the base stone he pulls the jacket closer around his chest.

“You are not well.”

A dry chuckle jerks the broad shoulders. His smile is ferocious and his eyes are deep with sadness when he looks up at his little brother.

“I haven’t been well since you fell. Why, there is nothing to save in me, Morning Star.”

“How can you say that?!”

“You are not a fledgling anymore, though you do act like one spoiled brat sometimes. Why bother with embers when you have the brightest of lights beneath all those ashes and grime?”

“I—I… No. I can’t without you. I won’t let you burn out, Michael. I need you with me. I need you to be there for me.”

“ _Why?_ ”

_Because you are mine! Didn’t you hear? I need you. I need you! I need you! You are mine!—_ his mind screams, so loud the universe should hear it. Yet there are no words slipping into the twilight and the air hugs them in silence.

Michael averts his gaze and sighs inaudibly.

“I’m just as well as when you teamed up with Gabriel on me and thought you caught me in the side.”

First, Lucifer frowns. It takes him a few long beats to dig up the dusty memory Michael is referring to, but then he is totally taken aback by the shockwave it brings.

“You fell to the ground.”

“ _Not_ from that bump you called a hit.”

“And took us out in the next swing.”

A breathless chuckle makes the air lighter.

“I told you a million times not to gloat too soon over victory.”

“Raphael just laughed,” Lucifer calls back the last scene of the memory like a spell was put on him.

As he looks back at him, Michael’s face is serene, glowing under the pale skin with all the ancient love for his siblings he has never truly allowed to the surface.

“Only in front of you,” he smiles with his eyes. “Later she bawled her eyes out. She thought you seriously hurt me.”

In his gaze, deeply carved in his thoughts and core is the confidence of _as if you ever could_.

It _hurts_. Like the final pang, the sudden, surprised gasp of the string of a singing bow that now is struck silent, and doesn’t even realize when death comes to reap it.  It is a silent kind of shock with the entire body of the eternal oceans burying him under.

It is overwhelming, deep longing.

Lucifer drops to his knees right in front of his brother. He takes hold of both warm hands, and presses his lips to Michael’s in a deep, meaningful kiss. It feels like the slide of a tiny crystal of ice from the top of the glacier. But it is dear, it is precious and it makes Lucifer smile ever so faintly.

When he pulls away there are two strips of pale white-yellow light circling Michael’s wrists.

It takes the time of his heartbeat to flutter back to normal for the elder to realize the trick that was played on him, but it is enough for Lucifer to meld the make-shift handcuffs into the mouldering stones and trap his brother in place.

“ _Why_ would you do this?!” Michael snaps, but his voice is blocked by bubbling anger.

Lucifer stands with one last brush of a kiss to the burning forehead.

“It’s to keep you safe, Micha.”

“Don’t call me that!”

He smiles. “Don’t worry. I won’t take long. Then everything will be all right. You’ll see.”

The sound of his steps hitting the cracked pavement up to the ruins of St Mary’s Convent is nothing under the billowing storm of Michael’s cries.

“Don’t you—Lucifer! Don’t dare leave me here! Lucifer!” Michael struggles against his restraints, but to no avail. Right now he is below the lowest ranked angel. He couldn’t fight Lucifer’s power.

“I’ll pluck your wings! Feather by feather, you darned little brat if you don’t let me go this instant!”

His smile only broadens. Wouldn’t that be one dream come true?

“You think you know Heaven’s true wrath? I’ll bring it down on you! Lucifer! Lucifer, let me go! _LUCIFER_!!!”

 

There is no real convent to meet at. The dome of the ceiling has been blown off, at the first or last time of his ascending – but who keeps count, right? The granite tiles melted into a mirror-like surface where the fading light slips into the shadows of the bench and altar splinters. The rose-windows are no more than colourful dust crunching under his heels.

Lucifer’s grace spreads over all these ruins. He will not be tricked so close to his goal. Never has he been so close. Nor has he ever been so determined. At this point he would take any deal, leaving humankind to destroy itself included, just to save what he has of Michael.

Even if it means living with such boiling anger forever.

The wince in his system runs core deep. The shadows shift to his right.

“Big bro takes bad to a new master, huh?”

Stiff and graceful as the ancient statues Lucifer turns slowly.

“Don’t worry. Gadreel will keep an eye on him while we strike our little deal.”

Stepping off the cracked dais where once the altar stood is Gabriel, with his playful smirk and a strange glint in his eyes. Though there is no fear to the youngest of archangels, only overflowing bravado. It makes Lucifer press his lips tightly together.

“Since when does the Messenger need a deputy?”

“Oh it’s all right. I got promoted. Long overdue if you ask me.”

Lucifer narrows his eyes.

“You are undeserving of any higher rank,” he says smooth and threateningly low.

He takes a step forward, and instantly Gabriel takes one back throwing his arms up in the air. Yet, he smiles as he waves the rod-shaped bundle of cloth in his left hand.

“Since your last dealing was with Michael, which arguably could have gone a _lot_ better, such rash moves,” reproving he clicks his tongue, “I’ll grant you an excuse. But really, Luci, I think we should set up a few basic rules—“

“Like no tricks?”

“Yeah… For example. And say, you take down this threatening attitude a notch.”

Lucifer smirks. His shoulders drop into a graceful line, his neck is long holding his regal head, only his sparkling crown is missing for the look of his old glory.

 “When we last _met_ , I killed you. Shouldn’t that put some fear in you? Because I can’t smell any.”

“Now, now—“

For all the illusion is worth there glints a sudden rise of panic in the amber eyes. However, the grace beneath is grey, envious, without the lively spark of the late Messenger.

“Take the trick out of the trickster,” Lucifer snaps his fingers, “and he’s dead.”

A ring of power bursts, the air shakes in its wake. As soon as the wave has rolled over the folds of reality it is no longer Gabriel but a wrinkled, paper-parched angel standing in front of him. Despite his older vessel, his mouth is pinched into a petulant, rather childish pout.

Lucifer tilts his head slightly to the side as he contemplates this brother of his.

“Metatron, right?”

The Scribe throws his hands down.

“You just had to ruin it! You ruin everything!” he whines. “It was a good disguise!”

Indeed. The myth of the Trickster who could have even Death over. That would be a title Gabriel would have loved to bear, no doubt. Lots could be fed this little white lie, to create a hero who survived the Devil, but Lucifer knows better. He was there. His hands are eternally marked by his brother’s blood. So many forget they were close once.

“Our ground agreement is naught,” he declares. “Call Gadreel away from Michael, and maybe I’ll let you negotiate your life for the sword.”

Metatron rolls his eyes. The lack of concern he shows for his own well-being makes Lucifer’s skin crawl.

“Chill, Gadreel is a good guy. Gullible and desperate. They’ll have a nice chat with Michael. Besides you took the risk of bringing him here. In his current condition it’s highly risky, let me tell you.”

“How do you know about all this? About our return,” _about Michael?_

“I like reading?” Metatron offers with a nasty, baffling and failed attempt of an innocent smile.

Lucifer glares, but the other doesn’t add anything.

“The sword. Is that what you truly have?”

“Ah, yes, yes. Here. See for yourself.”

On the top of one bench that miraculously survived Metatron unrolls his bundle. Among the folds of the parched blanket lie several pieces of Michael’s sword. It is hard to tell whether it could be made whole from all these, but there is no doubt. The yellow flame dancing beneath the surface makes Lucifer’s throat run dry. He fights hard to stash his quiver. _He needs it to save Michael._

“It’s not Andúril, per se, but totally safer in pieces, don’t you agree?”

Lucifer snorts at such blarney. He doesn’t care what Metatron calls the sword – it could bear no other name than what Michael missed to give it either way – what he rather would know is how he came to have it. And how did he know that Lucifer would go looking for it when he, himself, wasn’t so sure about that a week ago? Metatron certainly wouldn’t offer it to him, and obviously, since he knows about their current relationship, to Michael from the goodness of his heart.

His eyes rake over the bits. There are smaller slivers almost lost in the fold of the blanket, a palm-sized diamond shaped shard, and then there is a main piece with the hilt and the cross-guard with a big enough part of the blade that it could go half through a man all right…

Lucifer cannot shake off the feeling that it is not only the distorted broken writing on the blade that is off.

“Where is the seal from the grip?” he asks voice dangerously low.

“What, what seal?”

“Michael’s sigil.”

“I don’t know,” Metatron shrugs. “I didn’t know it had one.”

_Everybody_ knew it had one. Everybody has seen it blazing brighter than the sun. A sigil, bestowed upon Michael from God Himself appointing him as Viceroy of Heaven.

“It’s no use to you. It’d give you no power.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised.”

“You can’t be so foolish to want to fight me.”

For a second Metatron blinks owlishly back at Lucifer. As soon as he seems to have processed the sentence however, he starts a gurgling laughter.

“As in Apocalypse-style? Oh no. God, no! That’s so old. Like four seasons old. See? This is the problem with you. Both of you. You’re just two sides of the same coin and only the colours are different. Two such boring characters, oh my god! Always with the Daddy loved me least. No, Daddy loved _me_ least! You know what they say about first drafts. You, you and Michael are truly the worst. This is why I don’t need you in my story. Ah, hell, I don’t _want_ you in my story! One would think some character development might actually kill you.”

It is Lucifer’s turn to blink long and disbelieving.

“You’re writing… a story?”

“A little bit more than that. I’m the Director,” Metatron proclaims spreading his arms with a bright, sly grin. He does look proud of himself.

“You’re just playing God.”

“Don’t take it too badly. Daddy hasn’t been home for a while—“

“It’s an unlucky role to play around me.”

“Cut it, you! Always with the drama, boo-hoo. Michael did the same. He just didn’t have the guts to call himself god.”

“Don’t dare to compare yourself to Michael!” Lucifer snarls.

With flashing eyes he charges at the mouse that grew fat feeding on paper and ink. Metatron tries to protect himself, put some space between them, but no matter how many steps he takes backwards, successfully treading among the chunks of broken stone and wood, one part of the wall still stands and soon his back is flat against the peeling bricks.

His forearm close to crushing Metatron’s throat Lucifer glowers in the grey face, “You aren’t worthy of brushing against Michael’s shadow. You are nothing like him. You could offer nothing more than he ever did!”

“Diverse characters. Some action. Some romance—“ Metatron chokes on the following traits he wants to include in his novel. “Okay, okay. I get it, you’re overly protective of your boyfriend.”

_Please don’t hurt anyone_. Does this wish count even now, when Lucifer can hardly hear anything but his own fury drumming in his ear with a bone-deep ache of familiarity? Should he consider it when he is too preoccupied with Metatron’s face turning purple to even sense the strange, unnatural shift in the other’s grace?

He somewhat loosens his grip on the Scribe, just enough so that he could talk.

“Last chance,” he warns.

“Okay, okay. Just let an old man breathe.”

Lucifer takes a step back but only that he still has the other angel at arm’s length.

Metatron takes deep breaths so that his chest expands to double its size, his grace pulsates in the middle of it. He rubs at his throat where Lucifer’s arm pressed against his Adam’s apple, blinks a lot and long – but it is all for theatrics.

“Get on with it.”

“O _kay_ ,” the Scribe glares back. He clears his throat. “So. As I already said, I don’t want you in my story. You’re back, sad, but manageable. I assume Michael doesn’t, _and_ can’t go back to Heaven, and for the moment you’re fine with babysitting him.”

A ferocious groan strains Lucifer’s throat. It also glows in his eyes.

“All I want: let’s keep the status quo. Keep the control freak away from my plot, and I’ll give you what you need to save him.”

Swallowing back down a super nova just about to burst is a marvellous trait, but due to some miracle Lucifer manages. It doesn’t burn any less viciously in his breast though.

“No.”

Metatron makes a noise. A rude noise, something between a squeak and resigning moan.

“It doesn’t even surprise me. Throwing away the deal of the century. Think about it a bit more…”

“No. I’ll simply take the sword and we’re done.” Lucifer takes one more step away from this maggot. “And then I’ll leave Michael to do whatever he wants to do.”

“Don’t act as if he had a mind of his own. Come on, since when does Satan have a conscience?”

“Far longer than you.”

In a swift motion his open palm is facing the lesser angel, all the power of a blizzard sparkling on his fingertips. The very atoms of the convent shake, but as soon as the blinding flash of white light dies down everything stands still. The weather-worn meatsuit of Metatron grins back at him smugly.

Lucifer stands stock still. He feels compelled to stare at his own hand in disbelief.

Metatron, on the other hand, only clicks his fingers and Lucifer finds himself flying back through the hall. He slides even further on the smooth floor until he crashes against the opposite wall.

“You wouldn’t divinize Michael in a day, would you, Lucifer.” He says, lazily strolling over to the Devil. “I mean sure, I’m willing to play along with this delusion of yours, give you the sword and whatever. But when he is all human… Do you seriously think you could stop that? You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t die immediately. He holds himself far better than dear old Castiel.”

“H-how?”

Lights flash behind his eyelids, the air whistles as he draws a breath through gritted teeth.

The chuckle that worms its way through the distorted chaotic mess that makes up his world is revolting. It makes him even more sick if possible.

“Oh this is great! The Angel tablet really has some juice!”

Lucifer strains to push himself up on his hands and knees. He would go further but his limbs reject him.

“And since you asked, Michael’s seal on top of it all works like _magic_!”

Michael’s seal on the angel tablet. Angel tablet – Lucifer sets his wits to work. Just before his head falls back on the mirror-like floor he manages to draw up a faded memory. Yes, he has thought about these tablets several times. He wondered if he could read them, if he could find a solution for Michael’s state—

He brushes those thoughts away for the moment being. The sigil. The sigil…

It must be like a sign on the bottom of the contract. Simply the knowledge the tablets hold can be overwhelming, but Michael is still the Governor of Heaven by title. He would be the rightful owner of such might, but in his absence if one had his sigil it could entitle others to use all that power.

“I should thank you for being so deaf and blind, dare I say idiotic in your search. It brought my attention to look for the sword myself.” Metatron sighs almost fondly.   “Or you know, maybe we should thank each other.”

Lucifer groans. He would rather die than those words leave his mouth.

“Oh come on. Didn’t you wonder why the Winchesters weren’t on you the moment you snapped? Detroit lit up on every kind of maps with the crazy weather you two caused. I provided distraction. Loads of it. It’s my novel if you’re wondering.

 “By the way, did you know that Gadreel took your true vessel for a spin?”

“I knew.”

He finally gets back on his feet, wobbly but standing.

His eyes flash in the direction of the door. Metatron doesn’t care for Gadreel’s well-being. By the cunning look on his face if Lucifer wanted to knife his Messenger on top of the sword just to get him to agree to his terms, than this disgraceful vermin would even start selling tickets. If only he could get out. He could easily sweet-talk Gadreel – into what? _What_ exactly? Anything. Letting Michael go, or seeing how easily he is manipulated?

_Anything_.

With the distant roar of headwinds his shoulders roll and his wings stretch.

However, before they could flap a foreign force embraces him. It sweeps through his vessel. Wet and thick it clamps down around the base of his wings and he feels a freezing blast of pain like nothing ever before.

He doesn’t even realize immediately that he is slammed back into the wall.

“Always with the cunning and anger. And even more anger. Don’t you realize I’m doing you a favour?”

Lucifer pulls against his restraints. Even with his mind shattered in a thousand pieces he can make it budge. The grip shifts on his body, and it only scrapes the surface of his grace. He can fight it. It is nothing worse than what he has faced embodied in Michael.

“I could kill you right here,” Metatron keeps on. “Ach, now look at that. Our pretty sword is scattered all over the place. It would have been stylish, you must agree. The Devil’s heart pinned to the wall by his lover’s sword. Ah, beautiful, don’t you think?”

The angel stands in front of him, now their roles reversed. “Your stubbornness is so annoying. So clingy. Now, tell me. How bad is Michael’s grace exactly?”

A sharp finger-like tendril prods at his mind. Lucifer glowers back.

“That bad? Such a shame. _But_. As a proof of change in regime, my offer stands. Unlike the old Boss, I’m generous. You can go back and play house with your dying brother. I only ask that you keep him locked up. Handcuffs, silk tie, whatever kink sails your boat. So? Going once…

 “I just need a word. An agreement. A deal between gentlemen. Going twice.”

“What does it even matter to you?”

“Fans can become so radical. They’re such a bother. Going around with their suicide missions.” Metatron shrugs, but the false innocence quickly melts off his features in a felon smile.

“The king is dead, long live the king. Well, God for the matter. I’m the new God,” he declares.

“No, you’re not.”

Hearing this voice ring with such unearthly confidence makes Lucifer’s heart skip a beat.

Under the arch stands Michael. But despite the force behind his declaration he looks so _small_ , fragile, a tiny little flame that any breath could put out. No. _No!_ Panic, like a heavy stone drops into the pond of his mind and Lucifer’s concentration is shattered into million rippling waves, too weak to fight effectively his restraints.

_No!_ Michael should have stayed outside; he shouldn’t come in, cross a line where all he does is die!

“There is only one God, and that is the one I serve.”

For a second Metatron looks cranky, suspicious of Michael’s sudden appearance, but then he, too, sees what the eldest of Angels truly has become. He chuckles like an old man just tasting his new favourite joke.

“Just wondering,” he starts off-handedly. “What kind of a Houdini move did you pull out there?”

Michael walks even deeper into the open convent, shadows dressing him in dark velvet, his eyes bright under the stern line of his brows. His gaze lingers on Lucifer for a moment, then he looks at Metatron with disdain.

“I asked Gadreel to forgive me for his imprisonment and let me go. He is smart to reason with, mightier than any of us.”

Both other angels stare at him in different shades of disbelief.

“Don’t try to pull the higher-than-thou card, princeling,” Metatron snorts. “Whatever you did, it was plain manipulation.”

Michael gazes back at him, terrifying like the immovable eternity of the oceans.

Lucifer can feel the slimy grace let up around him as Metatron’s attention shifts to the eldest.

“It was plain reason,” Michael corrects. He leans down to pick up the biggest chunk of his sword. The hilt leans smoothly in his palm. Testing its distorted balance he adjusts his grip a few times, twirling the broken blade around – at its familiarity some otherworldly calm settles over his face. “What harm can I cause in my current state, right?”

“Michael…” Lucifer gasps, but his tongue turns to lead in his mouth. Now he is almost standing on his own two feet, and yet he still cannot call out in warning. He cannot scream for Michael to leave, run away, _why can’t he feel Metatron’s poisonous grace oozing from this whole place?!_

“For the very first time you are right,” Metatron taunts. “So really, what the hell are you doing here? If you wanna bore me to death, Satan is doing a good job on his own.”

As if his sun-bearing majestic wings weren’t simply scarred-memories on his back Michael pulls himself to his full height and doesn’t budge.

“Should I get Gadreel to escort you out? You’re a pathetic human, what do you want?!” The Scribe’s irritation rips through Lucifer too, and that shatters all will he has gathered so far to fight the malicious hold.

“You have lost your Messenger, Metatron. You are seen for what you truly are: a greedy, jealous sinner, responsible for our brothers’ fall. I’ll make you pay for it.”

The Scribe only snorts in laughter. In a highly theatrical move he throws his arms wide open, turning as if gesturing at the whole wide world.

“As if you could! Your threats mean nothing. Powerless you’re… well, nothing.”

“ _I am who I am_.”

Metatron grits his teeth, the meaning of the divine phrasing lost in his vanity-filled greedy heart. The only thing he understands is that Michael refuses to bend to his will of an author, and all he wants is to cross him out of the script.

“You, along with your old god, are so last season. Time to bow for the new one!”

His revenge first cracks down on Lucifer – the pressure on his shattered grace finally makes him coil into himself with an inaudible groan.

Michael’s lips thin into a stern line.  “Let Lucifer go.”

“I’ll. Don’t worry, I will.” Metatron says, and with glinting eyes he turns back to the fallen angel. “After he learnt some respect.”

Before he can lift a fist to bring it down on the subject of his jealousy the space erupts in heat. In a second sweat starts to bead on their vessels, the air is scorching to breathe, and it is only Lucifer who sees Michael pointing the broken chunk of his sword at Metatron’s back.

An eternal accusing finger points at him, hard and unforgiving and promising nothing but the truest agony.

Only one spark and the whole world will go up in flames—

“Let him go, Metatron. This is your last warning.” _You monster._

“Or what ya gonna do?”

_One spark._

Right in front of their eyes that tiny last spark Lucifer cradled and protected, _the last precious spark of his big brother_ lights up this corner of the universe as if a window had just opened with a view directly to the core of the sun.

Metatron cries out, covering his eyes from the cruel brightness and the scorching heat.

Lucifer feels his vessel cracking, his trapped grace desperate to make a run from the terror crawling out of that deep, deep, dark vault of his memory, but he cannot. Wherever he wants to escape to, tearing through Metatron’s nasty shackles, if he can make a break for the celestial plane, his moonlight grace is burnt black by the holy flames.

 “By the power bestowed upon me by the Holy Father I sit in judgement on you.”

 “You have no power, Michael! You are fallen! You are cast away! You _failed_!” Metatron’s wail sounds barely a broken whimper outbellowed by the Heavenly order.

The chapel around them is worse than the deepest circle of Hell.

_Stop, stop, please! Don’t throw me away again! You can’t throw me back again!_ Lucifer screams without a word, choked by tears of betrayal. Not again. _Not again!_

Michael doesn’t care. Such words are past him. He is deaf. The hole of his sigil is filled with blazing light, from the grip fires flare high, while his other hand holds the scales. It is far off balance.

“In your _rebellion_ you were found guilty of high treason. In your envy many of our brothers and sisters have perished, _you have aimed to put your throne above the stars of God_ —”

“So have you!” Metatron howls. He slowly sinks to the ground like the worm he really is, cowering at the Archangel Michael’s feet.

The world is trembling. Shaking, crumbling at all edges and corners. It is only a second before it all turns off its hinges and drowns out in the roar of eternal flames.

_He has done nothing wrong! He has done nothing wrong, why can’t they see it? All blind, obsequious scum, and he is the one to burn…!_

“—For your sins against the Host, I, Michael, Prince of the Archangels cast you away in the name of—“ His booming firestorm of a voice falters in a wet gasp.

_Not again! Never again!_

 

Lucifer lets the familiar rage envelope him. His teeth are bitter with poison, the starlit sword cold in his sweaty palms, but he would be damned if he is going down alone and without a fight. _Enough! Enough! Never again!_

He stabs where he can, blind, and deaf with blood rushing in his ears. He stabs. Again, and again, and again. He stabs, and stabs, until all that rings in the blood-thick air is his panting breaths turning even more ragged as the tears seize up his throat.

Finally the silver blade, now bathed in red stands erect from its grave of broken bones and torn flesh. And only as his fingers uncurl from the slippery grip does Lucifer see.

 

 

The world around him is cold, empty and dark. He is alone.

 

 

He is so completely alone.

 

 

 


	21. Monstrous Mercy

He sees what he has done and he doesn’t want to believe.

This is not real. This is not real. This is not real!

A wrecked sob gurgles in his throat.

“M… Michael…”

His fingers slide through the wounds still oozing with blood, the tips are ablaze and the thin sparkling threads sew the mutilated skin together. Only for Lucifer to tear his hands away – new wild red rifts break open and gape at him over flesh coloured abyss. He riles back as if he had just touched the core of evil itself.

It is _human_.

It is human, and he has power over it. It is not… Not Michael. No. Michael has stated hundreds of times how Lucifer has no authority over him. He might have his heart, his thoughts but not…

This person, this dull mortal shell is nothing. Dust and frozen blood and nothing else. No grace, no fire, nothing like the brother he so ferociously hated – but also nothing like the brother he loved with the certainty of the doom of a hundred dying galaxies…

There are no wings parched on the ground—

_They are already burnt on his back_.

 

This corpse. This corpse isn’t his brother. He didn’t kill Michael. He didn’t.

Frantically he scrambles for blurry memories of his out-leash. Yes, yes, he remembers. When he dipped the blade in flesh there was no flickering spark of holy grace. Nothing gold, or silver, or precious. Michael wasn’t there. He only slew the vessel that bore right no longer to wear the face so dear. That mortal mask was no longer holy, because it was no longer Michael’s…

Lucifer’s throat tightens and the voice that couldn’t make it through his mouth liquefies and gathers thick and heavy on his eyelids. The tears slip down his chin and leave a dotted silver trail on the ground to the dead body. He is shivering along with the air around him. No matter how repulsed he is, no matter how much hatred he had spit on Michael for his choices, _if only_ , if only he was right…

A trembling hand reaches out, he can barely stomach it but he dips the very tip of his fingers in each stab wound. When he moves to another one he fights to swallow down the sobs that shake his core. The skin beneath is brand new. Cold and smooth as marble.

It is even more eerie with the darkness seeping through the broken chapel.

Moonlight bathes Michael’s body. White skin, blue lips and black blood.

 

“Michael…”

 

No answer arrives. Yet again Michael is blind and deaf to his pleas.

Lucifer sobs like a child.

He cannot bury his face against a thousand suns. Oh he knows! He has known for hundreds of years that he could never do that again, but it is _different_ now. There is no use, no star shines on Earth anymore—and yet his hands are carding through the dark hair and he is frantically searching for the familiar warmth…

It is all cold and dark.

Michael is _gone._

Oh, Michael. Michael…

“Be damned!” he weeps, but as soon as the words fall to the blood-soaked ground his eyes flash. He pushes himself back up on his feet, hands balled into tight fists.

The world shudders at the rage billowing around him. Only that empty body lies still.

“Be damned and never find rest!” He cries. “You promised! You promised you wouldn’t leave me! You promised you’d keep your grace! You promised and you left me! Just like—just like—!”

His voice climbs higher and higher until words fail him and it comes out as a frustrated, agonizing scream.

“Michael…!”

Michael let go of his grace in the last minute. He was so close! So close! He already held his sword in hand; it should have been just a matter of seconds until he could reconnect with the other half of his grace, what cruel timing this world had!

“ _You_! _You_ took him from me! You killed him, you jealous god! You killed him because he picked me! Because now you have no one loyal to you! You killed him. _You_ killed him…”

Nothing happens. Michael doesn’t jerk back to life to give him a piece of his mind for the blasphemy of his rage. God doesn’t materialize in front of him to laugh at his misery.

“You fed him lies, you, you who claimed yourself to be true and merciful! You betrayed him more than I ever did!”

It is only him and the cooling dead body staring into eternal nothingness with glazed-over eyes. The lips aren’t parched; no soul, no grace has burnt out through them.

 

He has never realized how much he hoped Michael was right in his naïve theory of earning a soul. If it was true, maybe he could deal with his brother letting go of his grace in the last second, because then he would be still _alive_. He feels so betrayed.

Lucifer sinks to his knees.

“Please, please, you never loved him. Please, please, give him back to me!” he clasps a cold hand to his wet cheek. “He is no use to you. Don’t… don’t bother with him. Please, you never loved him. Give him back to me. Michael. Michael, please, I need you. Please, please, come back to me…”

 

“Don’t leave me alone.”

 

He whispers a name. He whispers a name so old and so beautiful the world turns away too undeserving to hear. He whispers a name he has thrown away in betrayal. He whispers a name he has clung to through all these years.

For the very first time this beautiful name abandons him.

 

On leaden feet time crawls by. Galaxies turn while stars die.

 

The Sun has set in Heaven. Night settles all over the Earth.

 

Lucifer squeezes his eyes shut.

He is still in the Cage.

Yes, he is still in the Cage, locked up since forever, and it has been time for the most creative torture ever. The next time he opens his eyes he will be put back together. He could scream until the bars of his prison shake, until his wings shatter. He could curse and beg for the pain to go away. Maybe it will, for a moment of clarity, for a second that he could realize that in just a blink the agony will go on. To realize that he is still in Hell, shredded, burnt and tortured, while Michael is still deaf for his pleas, high up and righteous in his throne—

The next time he opens his eyes he is still curled up on the floor. The next time he opens his eyes he is still a million little pieces shattered on the icy ground, the voice still lingering at the back of his skull.

“ _I killed him_ ” he whispers, voice thinned, barely resonating in the frozen air.

 

“I killed him.”

This time his voice rings with finality – not so unlike Michael’s used to. It is done. It is over. There is nothing to change it.

“I killed him,” Lucifer echoes, and now it doesn’t hurt. There is nothing it could hurt. What could such sentence catch of the hailstorm raging inside Satan? “What are you going to do about it?” He shouts at the ceiling, but he aims far, far above. He demands answer from the Universe itself.

“I killed your precious Soldier. Admit it! You, too, want me to win!” Lucifer’s laughter makes the sky crack. Blood starts oozing through the fractures in the cloud dome.

Now, Lucifer has had enough.

No more vicars, no more decoy to take the blame. His anger finally found his rightful target. First Michael’s traitors, and _then…_

_Then!_

Nothing that the Eternal Hand has created is precious anymore. Lucifer will tear it all down! Drown it in slimy sickness, hunger and blood; strip these mud-creatures of all their false dignity until God will have no other option but see what he had lost when He discarded His most beautiful first creation for the sake of these savages.

“You realized too, haven’t you? In your hiding, you realized that I was right all along!”

Lucifer pushes himself to his feet; shakes the crumbs of frost out of his hair and blows the drops of ice off his lips.

He picks up Michael’s discarded sword. He braces himself for its power to burn even the marrow in his bones to coal, but nothing like that happens. Without the seal – or the last spark to ignite its true power there is no flame to lash out. His flesh doesn’t melt. Yet, beneath the steel surface a light flares and blazes not unlike the colour of his very own eyes.

It is cold.

“Fine,” Lucifer says, the edge of his temper for the moment obscured by the smoothest silk. “I’ll do your dirty job this time.”

_With pleasure._

 

But first things first, Michael was right. Now that his brother isn’t around to feed his destruction-thirsty grace, it is mauling at poor old Nick. Demon blood can hold him together only this far. He’ll need a new vessel.

Lucky he has heard whispers about the Mark of Cain having been passed down to one True Vessel. Oh if they knew.

 

Desperate brothers. Always so eager to save the only one who loves them – the monsters.

 

 

 

Desperate brothers. They always die.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much if you took your time to read this whole fic. Please, let me know how you feel about it.
> 
> Also, this ends in tragedy. However, when I first wrote it I only knew I wanted to kill Michael, but wasn't sure if I wanted to keep him dead too. And so, when I first submitted my summary I promised an alternate ending. I wrote it. AN ALTERNATE ENDING, EXTRA CHAPTER DOES EXIST. Except, I presented it to [Tarte](http://tartedelart.tumblr.com/). Posting rights and all. So if you want to see it, you should start pestering her if I could add it to these 21chapters.
> 
> Thank you very much, again, from the bottom of my heart!


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